Shooting in Harsh Sunlight Like a Pro (so easy)

shooting in harsh sunlight worst thing in the world absolutely hate it nothing good about it the higher that sun is up in the sky the harsher the light and probably the uglier the image obviously judging by the title of this video we can make it work so i'm going to quickly show you a setup that i use literally all the time to deal with shooting harsh daytime exteriors the little demonstration you're about to see is a snippet from like a much larger lesson that i did with the beautiful people at moment i gotta go inside it's so windy out here and sunlight is really harsh that's better so this lesson is finally here we shot it a little while back in la it's called simplifying cinematic lighting it's not like a dumb like uncomprehensible master class type thing it's really just me showing you super easy super manageable ways to light any scene simple consumer lights one man band just like beginner level stuff i don't know like maybe like if you're not a beginner you might learn a few things but anyway if you're interested in that we can talk about it later after we get into how we handle managing harsh sunlight in our videos we can probably cheat you to step down just because we're not showing your feet no one's really gonna know if you're standing all right boom so here we have our close-up shot of mike framing wise it's looking great so we have the the the lines of the frames of the houses all pointing towards the direction of mike's head you mind holding the hose a little higher so we can see some of that water closer to your body closer to your body i know it feels unnatural but it looks great on frame yeah cool all right you can start wasting water look at this guy we're in california man we have like a really nice contrast between his shirt color blue this like dark deep brownish orange of like the wood on the house and then again with the blue in the sky so there's a nice repeating pattern in color and then on top of that what we have with our lighting because we're back letting our scene once again and that light that sun is just out of frame but still behind mic we're getting those nice alternating layers of shadows starting at the top of the house and then it gets dark and then mike's face is light then the shadow side of mike's face is dark and so we're getting these really nice like layers of contrast by backlighting mic where if we were to not shoot shadow side we flip this around let me put down a marker so i don't lose my perfect frame so see we're flipping it around now and all we're getting is mike's like super bright face no no layers of depth on his face it just looks super flat against just like a super dark background everything behind him is just falling to black because his face is so hot so there's just like no depth there there's literally two layers of depth light and dark versus however many layers that we had while back letting them so this just like looks like super average and mediocre and harsh and just don't do it as you see like in our wide shot it didn't matter how harsh this noon light was because we weren't so close to mike's face like it didn't matter like that his skin was looking ugly because we were so far away we couldn't see it but now that we're on the close-up shot sorry mike now that we're on the close-up shot like we're really getting into a skin we're really seeing all like the wrinkles and the cracks and the crust so what we want to do to make this look more flattering like make it look not so high noony is we can diffuse this light and what we're going to do to diffuse this light [Music] is use this this silk that just got soaked by leaning against the the bushes that mike was just watering here this silk is a diffusion material it's a pretty light diffusion material which is what we want to use outside because when we put this over mike's face the ex the levels of exposure are going to come drastically down because not as much light is coming through directly hitting mic so we don't want like a super thick material like if we were using like a muslin or something it'd be so thick that when we tried to diffuse the sunlight on mike's face it would bring the exposure level way down and the rest of the the background would just be overexposed and he would be underexposed so this is a really nice material this is the same material you'd find in like one of those 501 reflectors that everyone on the face of the planet who owns a camera owns i think you just like take off the reflector part and in the middle you have like a nice little silk so you can use that anything like you could use a shower curtain or something along those lines so what i want to do is get this right over top and out of frame because the closer this is to mic the softer that it's going to be as you can see take it in and out look how much that does so really the tights is when you're going to want to really start to think about how you're going to alter the available light what you're going to do with the materials that you have to make that tight look as beautiful as possible while the wide pretty much doesn't matter it pretty much is just establishing where your light source is coming from putting the our diffusion frame on a c stand so that i can hold something else because we're kind of short on people right now because we're trying to keep the crew small to maintain coveted protocol so right now i have the silk in a position where the sun's hitting it and the light is kind of falling a little bit too much into the shadow side of my subject's face and for me like i tend to like a little more contrasty images i like my darks be a lot darker than uh what it is now it's just going to create more contrast give it more of like a dark cinematic feel rather than like a commercial feel so if i was shooting like a narrative like ozarks or like stranger things i would want my shadows to be a little bit darker so what i can do now is bring in negative fill so negative fill is typically a black just like this and this black surface is going to absorb the the sunlight so instead of all that light bouncing back from every other surface in the world right now and all that light is going to be absorbed by this black surface and not reflect back into our subject's face causing it to be a little more darker so i'm going to bring my negative fill in as close as i can get it to my subject and ever so slightly those blacks are becoming a little richer there's a little more contrast ratio and we're getting a nice smooth roll-off from the highlights into the shadows genuinely like how easy was that like we set up our wide shot did nothing to the light we come in here for a tight we set up like some cheap material just to diffuse the light and if you want to have the option do one more step to bring in just like a black thing you can get like a black like tablecloth on amazon put this close to your subject and you're getting this nice beautiful image just like right away just by backlighting your subject just like controlling what you're able to control and just like i don't know focusing on your your contrast you can even see like the silk just barely touching the edge of the frame that's how close you want to get everything the closer that silk that the fusion is to your subject the softer it's going to be because the closer it is your subject the more the the larger it is relatively and the larger the source the bigger the source the closer the softer it's going to be so you always want everything just like just barely out of frame so as you can see there like it was actually in the frame i didn't even notice but we made that adjustment so this is the final shot of just like a little two cut sequence of our friend mike hosing his yard [Music] so we just shot that scene at high noon it is literally noon show my watch right now it is literally high noon right now we're out here shooting with not a ton of stuff we're looking we're making this look pretty darn good in my opinion so don't be afraid to to go out at any time of the day and use the sun as your source to light your scene hope that was helpful for you again if you're interested in seeing more from this specific example or if you're interested in seeing how i approach other situations like lighting daytime interiors nighttime exteriors you can check out the full lesson down below in the description like lighting is so stressful but learning how to simply deal with it and having a plan going to every situation that you come across is what's going to separate you from all the other amateur videographers out there i think for the first 48 hours it's like 79 and after that i think it goes to 100 but isn't great that you can just buy courses online for like a hundred dollars instead of going to film school and wasting tens and tens of thousands of dollars on just like useless time and information anyways thanks as always for the support i love you bye if you're wondering why i'm not in my normal setting it's because i'm moving far away and i had to ship my stuff so there's nothing in my apartment right now so right now i'm at my girlfriend's parents house

Channel: Danny Gevirtz

Views: 96,756

Keywords: lighting, how to, daytime, canon, camera, sony, video, filmmaking, light, sun, tutorial, beginner, peter mckinnon, cinematic, cinematography, lesson, breakdown, matti haapoja, chris hau, daniel schiffer, c200, manage, diffusion, soft, film, filmmaker, videographer, tips, tricks

Id: 8TijQqFEY3I

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020