Lighting
Lighting shapes mood, directs attention, sculpts faces and suggests time of day. Cinematographers are often called painters with light, but the first job of a light is always to say look here.
Three-point lighting
Key light
Placed at an angle from the camera axis, anywhere from 15° to 70°, with 45° the most common. It decides where the shadows fall, so it decides the shot.
Fill light
Opposite the key, softening the shadow side. A common starting point is a 2:1 ratio, with the fill about half as bright as the key.
Back light
Behind and above the subject, also called rim or hair light. It draws a bright edge that lifts the subject off the background.
Quality: hard and soft
Hard light
From a small, direct source such as bare sun or an unmodified lamp. Sharp shadows with crisp edges. Dramatic, harsh, noir. It shows every texture on a face, which is sometimes exactly the point and sometimes cruelty.
Soft light
From a large or diffused source such as an overcast sky, a bounce off a wall, or light pushed through fabric. Shadows have soft edges and wrap gently around the face. Natural, flattering, melancholic.
Softness is about size, not brightness. A source is soft when it is large relative to the subject. The sun is enormous but 150 million kilometres away, so on a clear day it is a hard light; put a cloud in front of it and the whole sky becomes the source.
Ratio: high key and low key
The lighting ratio is the brightness difference between key and fill, and it sets the mood more decisively than any individual fixture.
- 1:1
- 2:1
- 4:1
- 8:1
High key
Little contrast, few shadows, everything legible. Typical of comedies, sitcoms and commercials. Safe, bright, social.
Low key
Strong contrast and deep shadows. Typical of thrillers, horror and film noir. The extreme version, chiaroscuro, borrowed from Renaissance painting, carves figures out of darkness.
Direction
Sources and motivation
- Motivated lighting
- Every light appears to come from a believable source within the scene: a window, a lamp, a fire, a TV screen. The audience never questions it, because the frame has already explained it.
- Practicals
- The actual lamps and light sources visible inside the frame. Often dressed with brighter bulbs than they would really have, because they are doing real work.
- Natural / available light
- Using only the light that exists at the location, as in much of Terrence Malick's work. Cheap in equipment, expensive in schedule; you shoot when the light is right or not at all.
Colour temperature
Measured in Kelvin. Tungsten indoor light sits around 3200K and reads warm orange; daylight sits around 5600K and reads cool blue. Mixing them deliberately (warm interior against cold blue night through the window) is one of the most common looks in modern cinema.
Find the key before anything else. When you analyse a frame, locate the brightest source and the direction of the shadows first. Everything else in the lighting (ratio, quality, colour, separation) reads off that one decision.
Cinematography & Mise-en-Scène cheat sheets · built from The Foundations of Cinematography and Mise-en-Scène.