“How” Shards of light

Posted by kevin focht on Feb 3, 2012 in How | 1 comment

Creating something out of nothing with glowing beams of light.

Lighting with shards of light coming through an image is not as easy as it looks. This shot was from an editorial that we shot in the basement of my building. We had a whole circus set built, and then needed to light the set when there was no lighting at all. Once again, I used fresnel hot lights, as it was easier to see what I was doing.

The other reason I used hot lights, was because the art director wanted grain. It would have been really hard to get strobes at a low enough power to be able to get grain from high iso.

One of the things with showing shards of light, is that you need a fairly dark background and something in the air to reflect the light. In this case we used smoke in a can spray. I wanted to backlight the model, so I used a reflector (oh did I just say that) to fill on camera right.

One of the keys to using smoke machines or smoke in a can, is that you need to spray it and then let is settle a bit. If you don’t, then you can see how you sprayed it and it didn’t look real.

As for exposure, you can see that I exposed off the face again, and then let the highlights go. I think we did a pretty good job of making it look like daylight, even though we were in a really dark basement.

Kevin