This week we started talking about colour temperature. Measured in Kelvin. The lower the temp the warmer the light, the higher the temp the cooler or bluer the light. Now Naturally our eyes do a white balance but film camera’s do not so it’s important to have an understanding of the colour temperatures of your light sources. We mainly discussed that 3200 is a warmer light (tungsten) and 5600 is pure daylight edging on the bluer side. While using lights set at these temperatures, you can change the temperature of these lights with Gels, which is something we got further into this week. While learning about colour temperature I began to notice the temperature of the lights around me in my daily life. When I’d walk into a room I would acknowledge the temperature of the dominant light source. It also got me thinking about how filmmakers can use colour temperature to add meaning to their stories. For example, using creating a cooler, bluer light source to develop the feeling of sadness within a character as we would typically associate the colour blue with this emotion.

In our Thursday class we also reviewed the results of exercise 4. In this exercise we had to shoot two daytime scenes in a class room, with one of these featuring a lighting change where the character Emmaline stares out the window as the sun comes out. This was an interesting exercise that forced us to problem solve how to complete this effect. We ended up using a cutter stop the light hitting Emmaline’s face and when it was time for the sun to come through, we slowly moved the cutter out of the light’s path allowing it to beam onto the character. This exercise got me thinking about the use of exposure within the camera as we had to slightly under expose the original image so that when the light beam came through, the character wasn’t over exposed.

Finally, this week we touched on the topic of sensor size and how it influences depth of field. I found this conversation quite interesting. There’s a general misconception that the larger the sensor of the camera, the shallower the depth of field. This is definitely not the case, it purely depends on the focal length of the lens. This misconception is around because we tend to us shorter focal length lenses on smaller sensors primarily due to space constraints which will ultimately affect the depth of field.