Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on Slanted Lens, we're going to show you how
to create shafts of light both for still images and for film.
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If you're interested in doing a type of photography that is contained in a small space you
can shoot in your bedroom, then check out Stop Motion Basics for Beginners,
because that's how Trisha Zemp started out, but now she shoots for major
companies all over the world. So go to theslantedlens.com/stopmotion to see how
you can learn her process and you can do the same.
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I love the look of light
streaming into a room for film as well as in stills. There
are four principles that come into play when you're creating shafts of light in
camera. So let's get started and see what we can do. Number one, you have to have
atmosphere. Light cannot show itself, a shaft cannot reveal itself, unless it's
reflecting off from something. Whether it's smoke or dust or fog or something
in the atmosphere, light has to have something to bounce off from before you're
ever going to see it. So if you're trying to get a shaft of light out there and you
don't have something in the atmosphere, you're never going to see it. The easiest
way to create and maintain atmosphere on set is with either a hazer or a smoke
machine. I use a Rosco hazer and smoke machines. I love them because I've got
control on set when I want atmosphere. Number two is the angle of the source.
You've got to move your lights in and aim them back towards the camera if you
want a nice shaft of light. They can't be out and crossing as much as back and in
towards the camera. That 45 degree angle gives you a nice angle. Listen to the
camera and it's going to reveal your shaft of light. If you're struggling to see your
shaft of light, move your lights closer to your subject matter, aim it back towards
the camera, and your shaft's going to reveal itself. Number three is very
important and it's the quality of light. Right now I've got a Fresnel lens on my
left and it's on full focus so I get a nice shaft of light out of it. On my
right, I got a Fresnel lens, but it's on full flood and the light blooms and it's
softer and kind of opens up. It doesn't give you a nice shaft of light that you
really want. So continuous lights give you great, great shafts of light. Source
Fours, Fresnel lenses that are focused down, those are great lights for
creating great sources of shafts. In strobes, it's much more difficult to get a
shaft of light. You've got a reflector and that reflector bounces light all over the
place. You can put a grid on the reflector or you can paint the reflector which gives
you the best shaft of light, but kills a lot of the power. So here's where these
two worlds collide for me. I absolutely love the light with strobes, get a nice
look on my person, my talent, but then put a shaft of light through the window with
like a 2K or a Fresnel lens that has a nice focused beam of light going through
my atmosphere. I can combine those two and they look fabulous. I can lengthen my
shutter speed to make my shaft of light coming through the window look stronger
and it will match perfectly with my strobes. So I combine these two together
very often. Number four is shaping the light. Everyone uses a window, and why do
they do that? Because it's a perfect light shaper. Your light source is outside,
it's coming through a window, the window cuts that light source down into just a
shaft of light coming into the room. You can do that same thing with flags, you can
do it with trees. Anything that will cut that light source down and make it into a
shape will help you create your shafts of light. So sometimes you got a soft box or
soft source that's just not really giving you what you want, start to shape it,
start to cut it, and you'll start to get more of those shafts of light as you
cut that light tighter and tighter. It'll give you more of the shaft of light you
want in the room. So shaping the light sometimes will save you when you
got a soft source. So there's the four principles for creating light shafts in
camera. But now let's take a look at a photograph we did on a blacksmith's shop
and see how we applied those principles to create this image. When I first walked
into the shop, he's got his fire going, he's patting on the metal, and there was
atmosphere in the room already. The sun was coming through the window and so I had
shafts of light immediately. What is the best hard source of light? The sun, it's a
billion miles away. Is it two billion miles away? Maybe it's 40 billion miles
away. I don't know how far away it is, but it's a long ways over there, so that gives
you a really focused light and great shafts coming right through the window.
The image looked fabulous. But unfortunately, the sun didn't last very
long and it was gone. And so for us to keep shooting and get the images we really
wanted, we now had to create that shaft of light. I didn't have a 2K with
me, which is what I really wanted to have in that window, coming
through the window, so I had to come up with another thought. So first off,
I went all the way back to the beginning and I started lighting my person. I put up
an Octodome, Octodome with a grid, tilted it up, and I got a nice light on his face.
Looked fabulous. So I now have my Octodome on his face. I see my exposure, I know
what my aperture is. My second light I'm going to add now is a shaft of light
coming through the window. We're going to put a Baja B4 out there with a reflector
on it to give me that shaft of light. As I did that, I looked at it and said, "Oh, we
don't have enough atmosphere in this room." So we added
some Rosco smoke into the room. It'll give us
that shaft of light that we wanted. It bloomed a little more than
I wanted, so I backed it away from the window. That made it a little further
away, the source a little smaller, and narrowed the beam of light just a little
bit. So there's our second light. We next added another Baja B4 coming through the
second window. We struggled with this light through the second window because we
couldn't get the angle to really give us the kind of shaft that we wanted. If I got
it too close to the window, the shaft's straight toward the camera, didn't really
look like a shaft, just looked like an explosion in the corner. Turned it more to
the side as we moved it in towards the center, it was aiming more towards the
side, we lost our shaft completely. Never really got that shaft look to as nice as
we wanted to. But we let it light up the window on that side and moved on to our
next light. The last light we added was a fill light behind the camera. We can make
that brighter or darker depending on how dramatic we wanted the shot to be, and
we started shooting away. So there's an application of those four principles when
we were doing this photograph out on location. One, our light source was a
little too soft so we moved it away. That made it a little harder. We shaped our
light with the window, we got an angle on the light by moving it around to where it
gave us a nice shaft into the room. When we didn't have enough atmosphere, we
just add a little bit of smoke. Those four principles came together and gave us a
nice light shaft on the camera, left side of our image. I hope those four principles
will help you as you're trying to create light shafts in camera. Whether you're on
set or on location, those principles all apply. So keep those cameras rolling. Keep
on clicking. Three lucky winners here in July for our giveaway. Get over to
theslantedlens.com and win a Spyder5 studio package from Datacolor, win a slot
in our business coaching class, or win an SKB case. Get over there today, theslantedlens.com.
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