Lighting Exercise

This exercise offered an intriguing exploration of lighting. Tasked with finding some distinctive lighting around campus, my goal for this exercise was two-fold. First of all, I wanted it to simply be an exploration of the conventional practice of lighting the “off-side” of the actor’s face. Second of all, I wanted to see how a head movement could interact with the concept above.

The kind of lighting I found was that near a window in one of RMIT’s many stairwells. The light coming in through the window was cool and strong, but not hard; it was diffused by heavy cloud cover. Indeed, what I am finding out more and more is that if a diffused look is what one wishes to achieve, then cloudy weather is desirable. However, an issue of the strength of this light was that in order to have any details exposed in the background of the scene, my face became blown out. Since I was not the camera operator, I can only assume this was a compromise taken on their part. And indeed, I do appreciate the background detail, however, if I were to reshoot this scene, I would use a reflector board to bounce the sunlight and thus reduce its brightness. I do not think a desirable outcome would have been achieved simply by darkening the image and thus losing the contextual background information of the stairwell. Another facet that came to light during editing was that of lens dust illuminated by the angled light source. I call this a “facet” rather than a mistake because a case could be argued for its detriment or advantage. To its credit, it imbues the scene with a grungy realistic, down to earth look reminiscent of war and action films. However, it could be argued that in terms of classical cinema, it highlights a lack of preparation and proper equipment maintenance.