Hey this is Daniel Norton,
I'm here in my studio in New York City
with Pauline, and today I'm gonna show
you that something that's commonly
called the Book Light.
Book Light...
it's good when things have
names really.. it's really cool.
So it's basically essentially using two
ways of diffusing light, to get an extra
diffused light.
Basically you're bouncing the
light, and you're sending it through
diffusion, so what I have here is a
four-foot Chimera frame, fitted with a
reflector, white reflector in this case,
and I'm gonna bounce my Profoto B1X
off of it.
In this case I have the zoom
reflector on there, I'll show you guys
with a little modelling light - the reason
why I have the zoom reflector is, I don't
want to waste light, you know,
so I want to get as much light as possible here,
anything that flies by is not really
gonna help me, so I want to definitely do
that, and you'll notice the angle I have
it at, right, I'm not bouncing it like
this, like you may have seen me doing with V
flats before, because what I'm going to
ultimately do is, create a book shape or
a V shape like this, with the diffusion,
and that's gonna allow you to bounce in
and then back out to Pauline.
So here's the diffusion panel,
it's a full diffuser, four foot,
same size, I have it here, once
we lock this thing in, and again we want
to create kind of this V shape, so this
light is here, I've kind of
nested the C stands together, you
probably see that.
We have sand we're got just
one sandbag on both of them, this is kind
of out over the non you know sand bagged
area, but it's pretty safe over here, so
if you're on a busy set, you might want
to put another sandbag, all right, so go
and do this.
So you guys can see it,
so over here on my camera,
I do have a Profoto A1, but I'm just using
it as a controller,
so I can fire the light so
first of all we'll start with no.. no
flash, yet see what we get.
I'm at 1/30th of a second, because it's
kind of dark outside with f/4,
there we go, and that gets our windows
pretty much where I want them.
Remember I need light that hits the
window's because they're white shades
and it's gonna make them
look a little brighter.
So I want them to be a smidge dark,
so I'm gonna bring this
guy up whatever my TTL to is to
basically to zero, and let's see what
this looks like, nice and pretty, here we go,
good here we go, nice and even, I'm just
gonna check it, okay, looks like give me a
little bit of a darker exposure than I
want, so I'm gonna kind of eyeball that,
come back you know, it's heavily backlit
situation so the TTL needs to kind of
figure out what's going on.
You want to bring it up half a stop,
a little bit more, good, I think that's about
where I want it, yeah,
the idea here is is like
tremendously flat kind of catalog feel,
to the images.
So now that I'm set in
this kind of situation,
I'm gonna throw my controller into
manual, so it stays where it's at,
and I'm going to commence
shooting, so I turned it up again, just a
smidge, I'm just looking at it, yeah
that's good, all right, here we go, good
good, isn't fast, I have the camera on
beep, the light rather, as usual, so I
know where it's ready, good, I'm shooting
through a bunch of shots, this is pretty
forgiving, I mean it is coming from one
direction, so you don't want to have her
completely look the other way, but uh
towards the light is nice, I am shooting
at 1/30th, so I you know, I am being
cautious of too much movement, I'm kind of waiting
till she locks into her spot, not
shooting it kind of in the move, yeah,
let's hurry, let's take a peek, easy,
you can see a little bit of camera, a little
bit of movement at 30th, so we want to
definitely make sure that we're locked
down there we go that one's good.
So that's the only thing you want to be a
little cautious of with this, is a little
bit of camera movement, something I'm
gonna give the light just a smidge more,
the lights dropping outside, and as it
does it's making the whole image feel a
bit darker, so I'm gonna turn up the
lights a little bit more, let's see what
that looks like.
That's good, take a quick look,
I always put the computer as far away as
possible, so I get exercise, that's better,
all right you guys know I like my stuff a
little bit hotter.
Good, nice, good, beautiful,
now because of our proximity to the
windows that's the reason why we're
gonna get that little bit of blur guys,
if she wasn't close to the windows,
and you would have no problem,
even with a slower shutter speed.
It's really the light, the flash is
mostly lighting her, but we are getting
some light on her without it.
So a couple more, sometimes when it's
super easy you just have to keep shooting,
because it just feels good, good, nice,
that's pretty.
Yeah there we go, nice and easy,
right, just like that, but uh you have to
make that sound when you're done,
but that's like the important sound to make.
That's always the awkward part of it
they have to go back to where the camera
was, so that's it, right this is the Book
Light, you may have seen this talked about.
I think somebody probably started
calling it that, I don't know who,
somebody's gonna tell me in the comments.
Blah blah blah, I named it the Book Light.
Well there you go, it's basically you're,
you're doubling up, you're your diffusion,
you're bouncing, and then you're
diffusing because if you were to just
keep adding more diffusion to this,
this is already a full diffusion,
it's not gonna really diffuse it much more.
It's just gonna cut down your light, but by
bouncing it first, you're scattering the
light which is going to make it more
diffused, so it gives you that really big
kind of cloudy day light, coming through
the window.
No thanks for watching this,
I will put Pauline's information in the
description, so you guys can follow her
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I'll see you next time OnSet.