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Summer is out, yay!
That means you can go outside now and play.
But it's not gonna be without coincidences, that's right,
the sunlight is gonna be hard.
Like, super hard.
And a lotion won't cut it,
you're gonna need some real good tips to film outside
in the direct sunlight.
[Cinecom's intro music]
Hey folks, Jordy here for cinecom.net and welcome to Creative Tuesday.
The next couple of days it's gonna be like 35 degrees or even more
and for the outsiders that’s about 95 Fahrenheit.
So, yeah, I thought perfect timing to share some tips around filming in hard Sun light,
something that most of us filmmakers or photographers hate.
But when you know what you’re doing it's actually not that bad.
Let me know in the comments, guys, would you rather film in extreme cold
or extreme heat?
Now let's kick it off with the first tip and that is the position of the sunlight.
What you want to do is draw an invisible line through your talent
from the camera standpoint.
And try to avoid that the Sun and the camera sit at the same side.
If that's the case, then turn your talent and the camera around.
And this way the Sun light will function as a backlight, even creating more depth.
If the Sun light would shine from behind the camera,
your subject will turn out flat
and she won't even be able to keep her eyes open.
A little bonus tip to the position of the Sun is the use of lenses.
When shooting wide-angle it's gonna be harder to shoot against the Sun,
as you'll introduce more lens flare.
Zooming in going tele reduces that a little and will usually go better
when you have that sunlight in the back.
Tip number 2, when having that Sun lights coming from the back
your subject’s face will be underexposed,
since you need to fight against that enormous brightness of the Sun.
Now one way to fix that is by using a reflector or bounce board.
You can get such reflectors very cheap
and we actually did a video about this $20 reflector a little while back.
But you can also get yourself a foam board for just a couple of bucks
from your home depot.
You want to balance the light from the opposite side of the Sun,
in this way you'll create a beautiful pattern of backlight-shadow-highlight.
And this is a cinematic lighting technique which again creates more depth.
Do be careful that you don't bounce the light back from below.
This is a very common mistake,
balancing lights from below is used to lift up shadows
from underneath the eyes and nose
which always goes together with other light sources.
When working with a single reflector
make sure to hold it above the eye level of your talent
to create a natural lighting angle.
If you would use a stronger silver side reflector
then you could use a soft reflector from the bottom to lift up the shadows in the face.
Apart from a reflector you could also use world objects.
For example, this is the studio building,
it’s gray and it doesn't reflect as much as the very bright floor in the parking.
It’s better for me to aim the face of my subject away from the building.
I’ve got 3 more tips to make the most out of your summer vacation,
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And now moving on to tip number 3, always expose for the highlights.
Definitely smartphones or automatic cameras
will always over expose your shots in extreme conditions.
So, be aware of that and make sure that bright areas are not overexposed.
It’s better to have a foreground to be underexposed
than something in the background be overexposed.
For medium shots of a person or portraits
this means expose on the brightest side of the face.
So, if the Sun lights from a side, makes the contrast too big,
then rotate your setup so that the sunlight comes more from behind,
creating less contrast on the face.
And if the story allows, I would even better go to silhouettes.
Place your subject right behind the Sun and expose on the background.
This will look much better than if you would do the opposite.
Tip number four 4, with every time the Sun lights being in the back
your sky will never look quite good.
If you like to get that blue sky,
you’re gonna have to film with the Sun behind the camera.
So, this time we're gonna use our reflector as a Sun Shade,
and create a shadow over the talent.
For the best results, always work from angles,
so that your subject has a highlight and shadow side.
You could even introduce a new back light
by holding up a silver reflector behind the subject.
That brings me to the last tip, which is a little bit about filters.
And I think we all know what an ND filter already is,
they are basically sunglasses for your camera.
You screw it on and it cuts a bunch of light,
meaning that you can open up your aperture
and introduce a nice out of focus background.
But these NDs come in fixed values, usually these are better in quality,
but you also have variable filters that allows you to dial
to cut away more or less light.
I can highly recommend you to get one of those.
Apart from an ND filter, I would also recommend to get a polarizer filter.
Now, long story short, you can dial them to control the light refraction.
Some ND filters like the one from Polar Pro
even have such polarizer filters built on top of their NDs.
So you're basically getting 2 in 1.
Highlighted areas such as the sky will get dimmed
and become more saturated by using such a filter.
It’s basically gonna help you with the hard highlights
that we have the most trouble with when shooting in bright sunlight.
So, those for my 5 tips,
if you liked the video please let us know in the comments below,
it really means a lot to us.
Thank you so much for watching, thank you Storyblocks for the support,
and as always:
Stay Creative!
-Oh, man, it's so hot in Belgium today!
And I'm so glad that someone invented the air conditioning.
Ah, that feels good!
Oh, look how muscular I am!