Category: One Man Band Essentials Series

One Man Band Essentials: Soft Key Lighting (Part 3)

6/1/2020

Recap
In part 1 we landed on the Godox SL200W as an optimal LED source, when you factor in price, convenience, and power. In part 2, we saw that there are optimal beam angles to consider when creating soft light. We also, saw the magical properties of magic cloth diffusion.

2 Godox SL-200s on a Double Header

Output
The next factor to consider in our soft key light is the output. LED lighting manufacturers continue to push lights with more and more output. Lights like the Aputure 600D and the Forza 500 push into the 1.2K HMI territory. While this is exciting. As we’ve seen in part 2, the photometrics may be misleading. These newer lights use sleek new reflectors that output more light but give you a narrower beam. While narrow beams are useful for some applications, they are not optimal for our case of creating a large source of soft light within a small footprint.

Learning how to test lights or any other gear can really save you money down the road. Despite what the marketing says about CRI and output, you really need to see what works best for your situation.

The best way to test the amount of output you need is to use a light meter to take measurements of situations you most often find yourself in. I know as a one man band, I’ll never be competing with the power of the sun in a daylight exterior by using another light. Direct sun can output as much as 9300 foot candles. Even Hollywood productions oftentimes will choose to shoot when the sun is lower on the horizon. It’s also more efficient to work with bounce and diffusion to manipulate the sun rather than to try and overpower it.

In interiors, sun can play factor by blowing out windows that are in your scene. You should always do a tech scout of your scene to see what the windows are doing. Is it a south facing window with direct light coming in or are you shooting at high noon where the sun is blasting off of surfaces causing highlights to be blown out. Again, as a one man band the best way to add production value is to avoid competing with direct sunlight.

However, there are still many situations where a powerful key light can save you. For instance, shooting a wide shot with a high key look. You would need a light that can illuminate a scene rather than just a subject or talent. The source would need to be large enough that it can be backed away from the field of view and still appear soft. The source would need to bright enough to dial in your subject to background contrast ratio for a high key, natural look. Another situation is where the context determines that you shoot with windows along the edges of your frame or in the background. A key light in these situations allows you to stop down on your exposure to retain the highlights in your image and still get correct exposure on your subject. In these cases, you really want the right quantity (foot candles) and quality (softness) coming from your key light. You want a light that reproduces the color of daylight so that you can "extend" the light coming from the window and use your soft source light to wrap around your subject.

I aimed for an output that approximates 100 foot candles of light, 3 feet away from the source, in this case the magic cloth. That gives me headroom to just slightly overpower a north facing window or an overcast day. A lighting setup that gives me a lot of output gives me flexibility to handle a wide variety of situations. If I want to shoot something more stylistic, moody, or narratively driven I can always dim the key light to approximate the ratios I need.

Since I was able to purchase a trio of used Godox lights, I experimented with using two lights on a baby double header. I was able to get an even spread of light across the 6x6 surface area of the Magic Cloth. The double light set up was able to give me my 100 FC from a distance of 6 feet. That amount of light really does enable me to shoot an interview with a wider shot, while still maintaining a soft quality.

Stay tuned for Part 4 where we will look at our final qualification- simplicity in set up.

Plenty of output

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One Man Band Essentials Series: Soft Key Lighting (Part 1)

5/26/2020

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Motivation for a Soft Key Light
For one man band film-makers soft light is an absolute essential. 99% of our subjects are people and soft light is the most flattering way to light or “key” people’s faces. What makes light soft has nothing to do with it’s intensity or output. It has everything to do with it’s apparent size.

The sun is a hard light. One reason we know that is because it casts shadows with defined edges. It is not flattering on faces because it casts potentially unwanted forehead, eyes and nose shadows. What makes it hard is its apparent size in relation to us. Though it is enormously large, it is so far away that it appears small. We can reach out our hand and block out it’s rays.

The sky is essentially a huge bounce light. The hard light of the sun bounces off of the atmosphere and creates our daylight colored sky. The quality of the light is even and soft. What makes it soft is it’s apparent size. We cannot reach out our hand and block it’s light from our faces. That's because the sky’s light is so large in surface area that it is exposing our faces from many different angles. We will talk about the sun and the use of hard light to create visual interest in another post.

Photo courtesy of https://nofilmschool.com/2017/04/2017-led-light-shootout

The sky or natural light is an ideal soft key light, not only for it’s softness but also for its color accuracy. The picture from the test above is not the best example of soft natural light, since its a mix of both the sky and the direct sun. However, what's of interest here is the color accuracy of natural light. You can see the waveform of the sun measured on a spectrometer. Though natural light is balanced at 5600k or blue, its waveform is very balanced with rich saturation across the color spectrum.

As a one man band videographer, my goal is to create a simple lighting set-up where I can best replicate soft, natural light. Here is what I am looking for.

Color accuracy - high extended CRI rating, especially R9 readings which best reflects accuracy in rendering skin tone. High SSI value.
Softness - I want to use diffusion to create a large area of even light with no hot spots
Output – to approximate a window or skylight, I want the light to give me at 100FC (foot candles) 3 feet away, and over a broad area.
Simplicity in Set Up - I want to be able to set it up quickly and with a small foot print.

LED based source
To check off the boxes of color accuracy and output I really would be going with HMIs.

I’d recommend watching Robert Machado’s video on comparing video lights with SSI. SSI or Spectral Similarity Index is a nifty feature that let’s you compare two lights to see how well they match. Practically, what this means is that you can compare a daylight color balanced LED to actual daylight. There’s only a handful of people who review lights that own the Sekonic C-800, so there’s a limited amount of 3rd party tests out there.

Photo Courtesy of Youtube (Robert Machado) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrEw-cJzExE

As you can see LEDs fair poorly in SSI readings. This is because they introduce green and magenta color shifts. The K6500 Joker 800 stands in a league of its own with an incredible SSI score of 94! The Joker 800 is an HMI light that produces plenty of output, more than most LEDs on the market. It’s the perfect light to be used if output and color accuracy is all you care about. However, it comes with a price. A hefty $7,300 price tag if you’re looking to purchase a new K5600 Joker mark 2. Throw in accessories and extra bulbs and you’re looking at about 10 grand. Of course you can find K5600 Joker 400s on eBay for under 2 grand.

But out of curiosity, I also wanted to see if I could produce soft natural light on a tiny budget

So I started looking for output and color accuracy amongst the LED market. LEDs introduce the advantage of low power consumption, low heat output, low weight, and low cost.

To replicate the pure output of an HMI I started looking at point source LEDs made popular by lights such as the Aputure 300D. These COB (chip on board) LEDs pack a serious punch. They are extremely hard, but can be diffused to create the soft light i'm looking for.

While the Aputure 300D checks many boxes, it doesn’t offer me simplicity in set up. There is a separate ballast and control unit and a mess of confusing cables. I’ve timed myself setting it up at a normal pace and it took me a whopping 2 and a half minutes! I know a PA (personal assistant) would take even longer to set it up, and that’s if they would be able to decipher the confusing array of cables.

That's a lot going on

The Mighty Godox SL-200W
Luckily, there have been many companies trying to copy or outdo the 300D. I stumbled upon a review of the Godox SL-200W. What is so appealing about the Godox unit is that there is no external controller or ballast. Ultimate simplicity in set up! Everything is built into the light unit itself. Based on Curtis Judd’s Youtube review, its color accuracy faired comparably to the 300DII.

Godox SL-200W vs Aputure 120Dii & 300Dii

Photo courtesy of Youtube (Curtis Judd) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYhHMir5DVs

Color Accuracy
The Godox's CRI R9 measured in at 94.4. It’s SSI score measured against daylight came in at 73. Nothing compared to the Joker, but on par with high end LEDs, and at a fraction of the price. The Godox lights can be purchased for about $360 new compared to about $1,100 for the Aputure 300D II.

Output
The Godox output in terms of illuminance came in at 1800 FC, compared to 44,300FC for the Aputure 300D II. However, that number could be misleading. More on that later.

Drawbacks
The main drawback of the Godox lights based on many independent reviews seems to be the fan noise.

Fan noise was not a deal breaker for me, I would be using these lights several feet in front of a large sheet of diffusion, which would also be several feet in front of talent.

I went scouring on the used market and was able to secure a deal for three Godox units along with some other modifiers. After selling off the modifiers the individual lights came out to about $150 each, which is a steal. Three units are great because LED lights from different brands do not play well together.

The best part about this deal is that all of the Godox lights had been modified so that the fans were virtually silent! At the time I made this deal I still had an Aputure 300D handy. The 300Ds fan noise coming from the ballast was actually way louder, noticeably louder than the Godox's fan noise.

So where do we go from here? These lights have a smaller output than the 300D and how are we going to manage to soften these lights up?

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post!

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One Man Band Essentials: Soft Key Lighting (Part 3)

One Man Band Essentials Series: Soft Key Lighting (Part 1)

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