The above link has been a great source of inspiration of
late. It has really help me get to grips with the understanding of light and
the different types of light in terms of soft and hard and how those lights become
either soft or hard and also the different types of light readings and how to
apply them.
The great thing about this article is how simple the
explanations are yet incredibly informative and have really helped my understanding
of how to use my light meter to get the correct exposure levels. Starting with
the point of the difference between hard and soft light, the article explains
how the size of the light and closeness of the subject effects whether the
light is hard or soft. One thing I didn’t think was that I could use one light
and set it too far back and it becomes a hard light instead of positioning it
close and it becoming a softer light of course its finding the balance between
putting a bright light too close to a subject and have to stop it down too far
one thing I am starting to consider more and more with reading articles like this
is to consider the look you are trying to achieve in a piece, for example if
you want to shoot on a shallow depth of field I realise have the lighting too
strong would hamper the ability to do so as I it would be too washed out so its
understanding how to use the light to compliment the look you want to go for
and not just read the light and instantly use the corresponding aperture as the
depth of field that may be attained by using that aperture may be undesirable
for the look you are trying to attain. I now realise that the only way to learn
and understand this is with practising with different lights, different lenses
and different exposure levels as it one might want be underexposing or slightly
overexposing an image. I think the more I read and the more I practise then I can
only get better at judging the light not just for the correct exposure but also
for its artistic measure, so finding the common ground between understanding
lights, lenses, light measurement, and all the rest of the technical side is
difficult and complicated but no cinematographer is complete without knowing
how to use them all to create a look wanted that is the true factor in successful
cinematography. The next important element that the article covers is also how
to use light meters to get the correct exposures using incident light metering.
This is something that I have been wanting to learn for a great deal of time
now and this article has been very useful as well as other articles on the
site. I felt it was important as, as I have mentioned in previous posts I now,
after working with my light meter with Hugh Gordon I finally understood how to
set it yet and was not confident in using it to get correct exposure levels but
after reading this article and working with it on the filming of the eurosport
advert I now feel I can start to use to get good light meter levels. After
working with it and reading articles like this I then read the instructions
that came with my light meter and they made far more sense now it explained how
to record the incident light with high and low light and how to set it with
this in mind as well as how to set and hold differently when taking a reflective
reading. This has now lead me down the road of trying to get a better
understanding of how to read reflected light. Something which from earlier
readings seems far more complex in terms of getting the correct levels in terms
of greys and blacks but there is also another 2 articles on this same site that
covers reflected light that I have also briefly read over but intend to view it
more depth to try and get a better handle on how to do it correctly.
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