Lighting Wide Shots

[TheGrimmSleeper]

In less than a week I’ll be heading into a public library to film some scenes for a short film. They use flurescent lighting, which I have a filter for on my camera. I’m shooting with a PV-GS250 (hardly an ideal choice for this but it’s all I’ve got at the moment). Basically, I’m unsure of how to approach lighting wider angle shots. I’ve gotten fairly good at doing closeups and mids, but those establishing shots that focus more broadly on multiple subjects is something of a challenge.

For example, the first shot we’re doing is a moving shot with the camera pointed down an aisle in the library. It pans right, so we get a look down several different aisles, finally landing on a character in the foreground. Two others appear behind her so for a few seconds we’ve got 3 folks in the shot; one close to us, two further back.

I’ve got those halogen work lights and a smaller, softer halogen light that is fairly adaptable as far as where it can go. It’s not a lot and obviously it’s a different kind of light than the lighting in the building; not sure how that will work. Any advice would be appreciated.

[D0n]

I try not to mix my lightsources if possible. Find out what kind of tubes they use. Hopefully “Daylight” balanced. Use flourescent lights.

If that’s not workable, try using reflectors with the existing lighting.

You could (esp if you have something along the lines of a minolta color meter) order some gels (Lee makes good ones) to balance your worklights to the ambient light).

Lastly you could light your subjects with what you got, but have the lighting on your subjects at least a half stop brighter than the ambient florescent, and do a custom whitebalance at your subject with a greycard or white paper. (your bacground will have a color cast, but your people will look right!

[D0n]

if you use your filter, you’ll need to gell your worklights (Green) to match your florescent.

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