Tips for Outdoor Lighting

Dominique and I put together a short tutorial today using common grip equipment for controlling light outdoors.  We had an overhead diffuser with Opal, silk, and bleached muslin to control nasty overhead light at mid-day.  We used a silver reflector to add a back light and showed how to create modeling light with scrims and a black solid.

One thing I noticed while reviewing our footage is that silk seems to be a good starting point for overhead diffusion.  The Opal created kind of a blotchy diffusion and still showed the problems of under eye shadows.  Silk seems to keep a bit of the highlights on cheek bones, but the under eye shadows are almost gone.  Muslin was a bit flat for my taste.  I like to have a bit of light shaping a person's face.

Another thing I learned is that back light reflectors need to be much closer than I originally thought, not only for light strength, but for modeling the shoulders and hair on our model.  I think in our case it was about 5 feet back from her.  That provided the correct amount of "halo" effect.

I hope you find these tips useful.  As always please call the shop if you have questions.

---

---

A big thanks goes out to our beautiful model Sofiya for frying in the SoCal sun with us today.  It was a sweat bath out there and Sofiya was a true trooper.