From the course: Pro Video Tips

Tips for using bounce light

From the course: Pro Video Tips

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Tips for using bounce light

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- This week on Pro Video Tips, I wanna just give you a quick lesson on the art of bouncing light. Now a lot of times we'll use lights typically directly pointed at our subjects and there's nothing wrong with that. You can have diffusion on them, sometimes you might want a harder light, but usually gonna use a little bit of diffusion, but when we bounce light, we can get a whole another softer look, and a more natural look, a lot of times, and we can also make our light, a little light, go a lot further than we can sometimes when we point it directly at a subject. So, right now, we have our model over here, the lovely Corey, who has volunteered once again to help us out with the lighting lesson. And right now, I've got Corey sitting at a desk, and I've got her lit with a 400 watt HMI PAR light right here, so just a daylight balance light, and our scene that we have on our main camera, is set up to be white balance for daylight, so, nothing going on color temperature-wise, but let's look at what's going on light-wise. I have a very thick piece of diffusion on here, but as you can see, one of the issues that we're getting is that the light is casting this really harsh shadow behind her, and a lot of times, I might want to get rid of that, so let's look at the difference between this setup right here, pointed directly at her and what happens when we bounce the light. I'm gonna start by just bouncing it in one of the common places, which is just off of a wall right here. So, we'll just get this out of the way. Make sure that's not catching any extra bounce into our scene. So, I'm gonna remove the diffusion right here, because I don't really need that, and I'm removing the diffusion really because the wall is acting as a natural diffusion, and I don't wanna cut down or lose too much light. Set my C47s there, and I'm just gonna look at my shot while I adjust it. All I'm looking at is a spot on the wall where I can bounce it and still get a natural look. So, you can see the difference in the frame right now is that we've lost that shadow that we had there before behind her head, and I think the light wraps around her face a little bit nicer, and all I'm doing is simply bouncing it off of the wall that's nearest her. But look at what it's also doing for the background. So, this light is not just lighting our subject, it's also going past her onto the wall, and it's creating a nice little natural look, a little bit flat, so we're gonna see what else we can do to manipulate this light a little bit more. And I'll show you what it looks like if I go a little bit closer to the desk. Now, I don't want to go that close. I want to be careful when I'm bouncing the light like this, that I don't shine it directly in the scene, but I kind of like the modeling that I'm getting on her face right there, so this is the difference angled in a little bit more. One thing you have to pay attention to with bounce lighting, is that I really recommend that you look at the monitor when you're doing it, because subtle little adjustments like that can make a dramatic difference in how your light looks on camera. There we are a little bit closer, and what I like about what's going on here, is that if you look in the bottom left of the frame, I'm gonna turn it away. So there's our wall and how flat it was. I love the lighting on my subject right here. So, with this particular setup, this makes it a little bit more about our subject and keeps focus on her there, but I hate that boring flat wall, so, I'm gonna double this light, and right now, it's acting as a direct background light on the wall, giving me that little triangular drop off right there in the bottom left of the frame, but at the same time, it's bouncing up on our subject. So, I like what it's doing for the wall and I like the modeling that we have going on the curtains right there, but I also like what it's doing on her face. So, that's bouncing off a wall. Again, can play around with these, but you really want to pay attention to the little subtle changes that happen as you're doing it. So, that's one, now, if I want to get greater control over my light, so right now, I've got the wall. I can't move this wall to change the angle any. However, if I have a reflector, up on a C-stand, as I just happen to have right here. So, we got a nice clamp holding that in place, and I've got it angled up high, so what I'm gonna do now, is just point this up at the bounce card and away from my subject, so we're gonna get a very different look. Move over here. And now I'm just gonna shine it at the card, like give it a little more barn door right there. And now what I'm gonna do is use the card. So, this is effectively my light source now. The light is no longer my direct lighting source. This is really my source of lighting right here, and notice the size of my card right here. Because this card is so big, it's reflecting a lot more light, nice and soft, gonna wrap around her. So, let's see what happens when we can start angling the light. So, now I can get some control over how much light falls on her, and I'm just paying attention to the monitor there. So, notice right there, how much light we have on our subject, making her stand out right there, especially the nice blue that we have on her sweater. That's another thing, we talked about this in another movie, 10 Looks in 10 Minutes, but what your subject is wearing is also part of the palette of your whole scene, so the fact that we have her in blue, that's very deliberate so that she would stand out from the background a little bit more. If she was wearing brown, I'd have a little bit of a problem. So, here we are, just letting the light bounce a little bit onto her face, so we got a little more soft and subtle look, but the important thing is that, you can manipulate how your lighting looks by how you manipulate the reflector. So, I'm gonna turn this a little bit more that way. And the other way, we can also alter the look is when I do this. So, by doing this I can just feather the light a little bit, not too much from this angle. I'm gonna come, maybe over here a little bit more. And so, I can also control the angle that I'm bouncing it at. If I wanted to add any color tinge, or something like that, I could also put a colored gel on this light and bounce that off. So, that's two different methods. One method is our wall, the other method right here is bouncing off of a white card. Similarly, if I wanted the light to come from below, which I typically don't, but I could also bounce from down here, and bounce it up into her face, if I wanted to motivate it from another natural light source. But generally, in a room like this, where we don't see any type of light on the table, our light is gonna be motivated, usually by an instrument that's gonna be on the ceiling, so that's why we have a bounce card, up nice and high, like this right here. So, the third one that I want to show you, is probably the simplest, and the most natural one that a lot of you use, and this what I recommend my students use for documentary, and that is simply bouncing it off of the ceiling. When you bounce the light off of the ceiling, it's gonna be motivated by whatever light source might normally be on the ceiling, and it's gonna create nice even diffused light across the room, and what's great about that method, I'm telling you about it, when I could just show you. What's great about the ceiling method is that once you put the light up there, it creates a much more natural look. So, I'm gonna open up my barn doors a little bit. Give me a little bit more bounce. Don't forget, you still got barn doors even though you're bouncing the light. So, off of the ceiling, just gonna get this out of the way so it's not contaminating my scene. So, once I've got this bounced off the ceiling, and I'm actually gonna lower it a little bit. So, now that I've got this bounced off of the ceiling, it's creating a very natural look and I could also back it up a little bit further in the room if I didn't want it to seem like there was too bright a light coming down on her. For documentary, a lot of times, even though it's documentary, and you might want to do things really natural, you still need enough light to get a decent exposure, and to see everything going on in the scene. So, if you want a very subtle, natural source of light, I recommend bouncing it off of the ceiling, and you can do that with almost any kind of light, but as you can see, it's also kind of flattening out my whole scene. So, I've got a very even light on the wall to the left here. I lost the modeling that we had going on early with the curtain, but I still have a natural look. So, as this is pointed towards her, I'm gonna try to just point it away, and get a little bit of a bounce right there. So, I'm pointing the light away from her. Looks kind of about the same to me right now. One note that I do want to point out about this method right here, when you're using a ceiling bounce, be very careful that you don't get too close to the ceiling. Two big things you wanna look out for, and one of them could be disastrous. The first one is sprinklers. If there's sprinklers on the ceiling, we're not bouncing any lights off of the ceiling. Maybe from very, very far away, but I wouldn't even risk it then, because any heat could set off the sprinklers, and that's gonna be the end of your shoot. And the second thing we want to look out for, is even if there's not sprinklers, and I learned this the hard way in film school, you don't want to put the light too close to the ceiling because you could potentially burn the ceiling or leave a brown spot. These lights generate a lot of heat coming off the top of them, so even if you're like a foot away from the ceiling, you think that might be far enough, by the time you're done shooting an hour later, you could do some damage to the ceiling. So, be careful when you're using that light off the ceiling. So, those are our three methods. We have the ceiling, we can bounce stuff off of the wall, we can bounce it off of a white card, or pretty much any other material you have, that's light enough to reflect light, so you can get creative with this technique. But in addition to just pointing lights directly at people, you should also try making it bounce sometime.

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