The Natural Light Look

Home Applications The Natural Light Look

Garrett Sammons Garrett is the Creative Director at Nice Shirt Media and part-time film professor. With a primary focus on commercial cinematography, he also creates narrative and documentary films.

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Written by Garrett Sammons

Production quality is primarily determined by the quality of lighting, more so than the camera, lenses, gear, or other fun equipment you might have. Lighting is what will make or break the overall look of your project. One of the most appealing production choices is natural lighting.

There is a misconception that natural light and available light are the same thing. This couldn't be further from the truth. Available light involves filming without fixtures. Most of the time, it also involves filming without modifiers. As its name suggests, available light means filming with the light you have available. In contrast, natural light is a style or aesthetic you can create. It is essentially a production choice.

There is an application for both available and natural light. A natural light environment allows us to have consistency, control, and contrast when filming. To demonstrate these three key lighting principles, we filmed a fake commercial using natural light

Step 1: Control (diffusion) Outside filming always requires some form of diffusion between the subject(s) and the sun. And because the relative surface area of the sun in relation to our subject is very small, it creates very hard and harsh light. This results in wildly unattractive shadows.

Here, we placed a 12 12 butterfly diffusion frame on the overhead of our talent to maintain a level of control. We used a full-stop diffusion to even out our light.

We had a mix of sun, clouds, and rain on the day we filmed. Hence, natural lighting was a much more viable option than available lighting. Using the latter in this case would have resulted in inconsistent light intensity and behavior from shot to shot. The overhead diffusion helped us balance out the different weather conditions we had throughout the day.

A large diffusion overhead ensures a more consistent style and intensity of light. Although you might not need one quite as big in your project, the 12 12 frame gave us enough space to move around our talent without being too confined.

Diffusion gives you control of both the intensity and behavior of your light, which makes it the first step of every lighting setup.

Step 2: Contrast (negative fills) A negative fill pulls light away from the subject, which affects the contrast. Negative fill is just as important as diffusion or adding fixtures. It's not always about adding more light. Rather, it's often about controlling the light you already have. And you can build contrast more easily by pulling light away than you can by adding more.

For this shoot, we used two different styles of negative fills. The first one was a 6 8-foot duvetyn roll with a 4 4-foot frame as a float. We positioned and repositioned the duvetyn as necessary to block reflection or hide spill. We also positioned the 4 4 frame in a way that adds contrast to the shots.

The diffusion and negative fill essentially allow you to turn available light into natural light. Once you have sculpted your available light in a way that makes sense, you can then use your fixtures to create your desired look.

Step 3: Key Light We used a battery-powered Gemini 1 1 Hard as the key light. Because the sun was on the camera's left side of our talent, we used our key light on the right. Using this lighting fixture allowed us to emulate the light behavior of the sun without the typical unattractive shadows.

Color grading can also help you sell the sunshine. Warm grading, as well as a sprinkler sound or birds chirping in the background, can make the setting feel like a nice sunny day.

The key light was positioned 4-5 feet away from the talent for most of the shoot, with an 8-10 feet distance for the wide shot. We placed the 12 12 grid with 1-stop diffusion overhead our talent, using only two standard combo stands. We had the duvetyn approximately four feet away from our talent. Our float was positioned and repositioned as necessary to avoid reflection or glare on the glass of the phone.

Step 4: Edge Light Edge lights are best done when they're unnoticed by the audience. We use this fixture to pull the subject away from the background, ensuring that the audience only focuses on the subject and is not distracted by everything else.

Here, we used the Quasar Science 4 Double Rainbow tube-style LED light to separate our talent from the background. Because everything is so soft and diffused, we needed a crispy edge around the talent to keep them off the grass behind them.

We had the Double Rainbow at 100% intensity and 5600K temperature, which was enough to give us exactly what we needed to pull our foreground from the background. This control, contrast, key, fill, and consistency is how we approach lighting. These principles are the same across all lighting setups.

Why are these lighting techniques important? The kid wasn't available on the shooting day. So, we ended up filming his scenes on a blue screen during a much sunnier day. We had the diffusion overhead, the blue panel behind him, and the same key pulled off a bit further away. However, we got the light to behave in the same way because we had consistency, control, and contrast.

If we didn't have these lighting principles right, we wouldn't be able to color-match those very different shooting days or get believable light behavior. So, whether you use the same types of modifiers or fixtures we used doesn't matter. What matters is that you keep these principles in mind for every project you work on.

Natural Light Quick Tips

You should always know the path and trajectory of the sun throughout

LINK:	https://www.litepanels.com/en/applications/the-natural-light-look/...
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