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Rolling with the BIG Dog - Commercial - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5

by Damian McGillicuddy Published 01/08/2015

THE VALUE OF VALUES
Before I tell you what those accent lights metered at, I think it's worth taking a moment to talk about exposure values or "EV" numbers. As you will know if you've been to one of my presentations, I'm a stickler for metering and will say, "This light meters f/4," or "This meters f/2." But the thing is, that f/4 or f/2 is only relevant in that specific place, time and situation; if you tried to recreate the exact same set-up at home, with slightly different conditions, your meter readings would be totally different.

So to my mind, it would be much better to talk in exposure values for the purpose of learning - and in this case, the accent lights are EV-2 to the key light. And if we talk in those terms, it doesn't matter what the actual f/number is and it doesn't matter if it changes, because if we think about the EV relative to the key then it becomes a sliding scale - so it's irrelevant whether you have to shoot at f/11 or f/2.

For the key light it was basically a classic clamshell but shot with my new favourite clamshell lighting modifiers, which are three-foot by onefoot strip boxes. And the fill light, again using exposure values as our measuring stick, is EV-1.5 to the key, which ensures that it's just creating that fill for us without dominating the direction of the light.

Because the main subject in the image is wearing eyeglasses, we had to be very careful about getting reflections in the lenses. And the reason that strip boxes help here is that there's not a massive spread of light, so I could angle it to get the lighting pattern that I wanted without having to worry about horrendous catch lights in the glasses (working on our everfaithful physics principal that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection).

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1st Published 01/08/2015
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:26

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