When lighting an interview, or a larger set for a video production, it is only natural that your first thoughts will be focused on the type and quantity of light fixtures that you will use, but how much thought do you put toward your shadows and why might that be important?
A shadow, in a few words, is the absence of light, but it’s shadow that gives an image it’s style, texture and emotion.
Almost every lighting starts with your main “key” light and the placement of that light on your subject will create a shadow of some sort. That shadow will have three important characteristics, its shape, softness and its color.
A shadow’s shape is caused by the angle of the light falling upon your subject and you can make that shadow pleasing or ghastly depending on where your light source is placed (Remember putting a flashlight under your chin?). The further your light is from center, the more extreme your shadow will become. Spending a few minutes moving a single light around on a test subject will quickly show you many possible variations.
A shadow’s softness is determined by the size and distance of your light, as well as the type of modifier used in front of the light, such as a scrim, soft box, or by bouncing your light off a card, wall, or white umbrella. The larger and closer the light source, the softer the shadow will be. Likewise, the further back you move your light, the harder, more distinct your shadows will become.
With the newer, variable color and bi-colored lighting, it is often possible to adjust our lighting to match the ambient tone of our environment and then white balance our cameras to allow our lighting and shadows to be a similar color temperature.
A shadow’s color is controlled by any stray, ambient light that might be in your shooting environment. This can work for you or very much work against you. Here’s an example: You are setting up an interview in a chapel. Your key light has a soft box, pleasantly diffusing the light, making for an attractive portrait, but ambient window light has now filled your shadows with a bluish, unpleasant tint. At this point, you either need to add an additional, ”fill light”, meaning a light to fill in the shadows, or find a way to block the ambient light, which might be difficult if even possible.
With the newer, variable color and bi-colored lighting, it is often possible to adjust our lighting to match the ambient tone of our environment and then white balance our cameras to allow our lighting and shadows to be a similar color temperature.
On the other hand, we can use the color of shadows to our advantage by filling the shadow area with a color of our choosing. If an area is in complete shadow, it requires very little light to fill it with color.
Planning Your Shadows
Planning your shadows can be extremely helpful and cost effective on larger sets, as well. I’ll explain using a recent production that I worked on as an example.
In the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Rhett Owen, the lead video director at Hope Community Church, here in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rhett will often search for unique locations to stage Hope’s video productions, not just for the sake of the viewer, but also to keep his video team from becoming stale repeating the same location year after year.
Very often that unique location for our production is determined by what we can obtain for free. This year, we were offered the use of a large, vacant warehouse as a location to stage a Good Friday video production, which presented many opportunities and an equal number of challenges, mainly lighting.
The Good Friday setup required two separate sets. The primary set had several of our worship leaders sitting on two sides of a long, rectangular table, re-telling the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. The second set would serve for musical performances by our worship team.
If an area is in complete shadow, it requires very little light to fill it with color.
Within our 4,000-square-foot studio area, we wanted to use a minimum amount of lighting fixtures to illuminate our sets and let the shadows do the rest of the work for us. For our key light, we hung a Nanlite Forsa 500watt LED, with a large China ball light modifier, from a Kupo boom stand directly over the table. This allowed everyone seated to be evenly lit with a very soft, complimentary light. This main light source would naturally fall off into shadow, giving the appearance of a soft, dark background surrounding the entire set.
As the back of their heads would also be in shadow, a single, low-power Forza60 fresnel light on each side of the table was all that was required to fill in that shadow, giving each person a bit of an edge light, which helped give additional dimension to our setting. Again, very little power was needed for this, as the shadow area was previously without any light at all.
As we were already in a warehouse setting, we felt there was little need to hide the light stands and tripods which from most angles fell off into the darkness of the shadows.
A similar soft China ball lighting was used for the worship performance. Again, one light could evenly illuminate the entire band with soft, even light, with the background falling off into deep shadow. We used two Nanlite 150 RGB Mix Panels to fill in the background shadows with color set to low power as it did not require a ton of light to add a color in place of the shadow’s void. As the colored backlight was only strong enough to fill the shadows, it didn’t interfere with our front light and simply added some emotion to the overall program.
So, in this case, shadow helped create a background for a very large space and helped enhance the mood of the program.
And the best part? You can use all the shadows you want for free.
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