Monday 1 October 2012

Reflector Footage

Use of Reflector

For this locations health and safety please click link. 

As we had not yet experimented with any lighting techniques, on this shoot we decided to take out the reflector to see what kind of shots we could, how much difference it made etc. We headed back to Five Street Park where we did one of our earlier location shoots, as we thought it was a fairly good location.
The majority of reflectors, including the one we were using here, have one silver side and one gold side. Each side gives a slightly different effect. The silver, enhances the light creating a brighter shine upon the subject and the gold side defuses the light given a more even, matt finish.
We first attempted with the silver side of the reflector, with proved to have very little effect due to the overcast weather conditions. As we only had natural lighting to work with, this was not enough effect. we then flipped over the reflector to use the golden side and this turned out to have a much more prominent effect, leaving our footage looking much more professional.


No Reflector

Using Reflector
























As you can see from these two stills, the reflector brightens up the subject. Highlighting the hair and the face, giving the image a more pristine finish. On a less overcast day, this would be even more effective. In the clip below, the difference is even more clear to see.
We have used a wide aperture (f/2.8) for this footage to create a shallow depth of field, this brings the subject into focus, to avoid any kind of over exposure we ensured that the ISO was kept to a minimum (100). This focus and by using the reflector, the footage from this shoot have probably turned out the best of any shoot we have done. The end result has achieved a good professional finish, with some nice composition.


reflector - no reflector from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

I have included here a high contrast black and white edit of this same footage (above) to demonstrate how the reflector would have been a good low budget way of creating nice lighting in a new wave film. The reflector would have been used when making new wave films, due to its good effect, making useful for these low budget films. Making this link with the new wave in such a way means that we are sticking to the outline of brief.  We are maintain a low budget and maiming use of things such as reflector to maximise what resources are available to us, such as natural lighting. The subject within the footage is a non-professional actor, again meeting the criteria of our brief by using techniques and conventions of the Nouvelle Vague.


reflrctor black and white from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


The piece of footage below, makes good use of the manual settings on the camera. We began by having the entire shot out of focus, and then having the subject walking directly towards the camera and coming into focus. We end up with a shallow depth of field, the subject, now in the foreground, in in complete focus, while the background of the shot has remained out of focus. This has a particularly good effect when edited into high contrast monochrome.


into focus bandw from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


No comments:

Post a Comment