How to ACTUALLY Shoot with Natural Light | 3 Essential Tools You Need

If we can use something to soak up that light, give her a little bit of contrast, it could be a great look. You know what's the last thing that I would add? Is I would turn on these backlights over here. Okay, so, we are going to, how do we fix something like this? Hey, what is going on Indy Mogul? My name is Ted and today we're gonna talk a little bit about a super age old problem and that is, how do I deal with windows when I'm trying to shoot a beautiful looking image, an interview or a documentary? Specifically, how do I use just window light to make sure that I have a beautiful looking image? And number two, if I have a super blown out, ugly looking window in the background, how do I deal with it instead of just keeping it in the shot? And to talk about this today, I got my buddy Casey McBeth over here. Get over here. How's it going, man? What's up? So, Casey's been on the show before, of course, as you guys know. Today we're talking about windows. So, Casey, no lighting today. And you have to use your best friend, the Canon EOS 16 Mark II. Cool. It's great, it's fantastic. You know, we need to show that beautiful images are possible no matter what gear people have. Well, I mean, that's true. Like, everybody can do pretty much anything with everything, so. And that's why Casey's favorite camera is the 16 Mark II. So, now that you've got your favorite camera, let's walk on over here. And real quick, let's introduce our model for today. Hey, Katie, how's it going? Hi, good, thank you. Hey, you're pretty blown out in this frame because it's really bright, right? Okay, so, we are going to... Is it possible to make a beautiful looking frame like this? Good God. Yeah, I mean, of course. I mean, there's a lot of things we can do. It just depends on how pretty do we want to make it. Let me just do something real quick in the camera. I'm just going to show you guys. I'm going to drop the ISO. And again, this is what it should look like when we are exposing for Katie in the sunlight. That's like the closest we can get. And that looks kind of right, right? Number two, though, if I was exposing for the background and the rest of the environment, the background looks good now, but Katie's super duper bright. So, how do we make those worlds meet? So, the thing that we have to do, if we're not using lighting equipment, so we can't raise the exposure of the background and stuff to match her, we need to get her exposure to match the background. So, we need to dumb this light down. We need to knock it down as much as possible. But also, just because what we're getting right now is literally direct sunlight, we need to soften it. We need to make this more attractive. So, we can do that at the same time by using some really thick diffusion material off camera. So, the thing, though, is that the sun is really large, so it should be a soft source, but actually, it's so far away that it becomes a little blip in the sky, which means that it's really hard light. So, when it hits on someone's face, like Katie right now, we gotta get you out of this light. We'll get you out of here in a second. It's super hard, and it's gonna create kind of really intense shadows that are hard, and they don't look as attractive on the skin. So, what is our first step? We need to diffuse and knock down the intensity of this light that's coming onto her. If we have any material, like gel, that's exceptionally thick, or if we have any diffusion that is on the really heavy side, if we wanna go the homegrown approach, there's tons of materials out there you can buy super cheap. Curtains is a great one. There's also, I've purchased shower curtains in the past. Let's do that. Yeah, let's find what we got and start putting some stuff up. Okay, so, gaff tape, filmmaker's best friend. If you don't have this already, buy this now. It's probably the most expensive tape that you'll buy in the world, but it's just tape, so it's not that expensive at the end of the day. But what's important about this is, number one, it's super strong, it's gonna hold everything together. Two, it's really kind of the filmmaker standard in terms of being able to be hot, and it's not gonna peel off in that way, too. So, super important. All right, so we got here, this is shower curtains, right? Yeah, this is just a shower curtain I picked up at your local big box store. Okay, so let's get this up and behind this plant. Oh, can you hold this side up for a second? Yeah, let me rip this tape. Let's just see how we're looking in this frame. Yay! Looking so much better already. Yeah. Sorry. I noticed that was my tape. My tape is the one that fell. So, this is literally shower curtains. That's looking pretty good right there. It's pretty, still a little bright, right? Still a little bright, but I mean, there's a couple things that I'm already noticing now that we've gotten this far. With this light now being softer, it's spreading more, so what we can do is we can also cheat her and the plant further away from the window. It's not gonna drop the intensity that much, but we'll still get light on her because now it's being diffused and softened right here. So, Katie, can we have you scoot just a little bit to the side? All right. Okay. Looking good. Yeah, do you, now, hold on a second, just wanted, I'm gonna keep messing, everything that you do, I'm gonna undo. Okay. So, now we've got good exposure on her. We're at a deeper stop than we'd probably like to be, and our background is still a bit dark. So, if we continue to knock her down, we can re-expose and bring back some of the life and brightness. So, you wanna put up another piece of diffusion on there? I think by going thicker on this, we'll be able to knock the intensity down, keep the quality of it, and that'll help us balance the foreground and the background. Gotcha. So, one of the missions that we showed here is we showed the shower curtain, right? And again, this is like super indie. You can buy this pretty much anywhere. However, what we are doing is if you wanna go past just indie, you can actually get different types of cloth. These are called diffusion cloths. You can get them in the film industry. This one right here is called magic cloth. It's one of the thicker diffusions out there, which means that's going to suck up more light. So, you can get half-grid or quarter-grid, and those are just different densities for how much light is being cut out from that diffusion. The amount of light that you're trying to cut is gonna change all the time, too. So, if you need more precision than just the shower curtain, that's why these companies exist. Chase, this is looking really good. We're getting there. Check this out. So, we're getting a lot of evenness to her just because we're getting a lot of direct sun on this wall, and I think that's caused a lot by the sunlight coming through this untreated window, bouncing off this white wall, so it's just giving her this gigantic bounce back. So, I think if we can use something to soak up that light, give her a little bit of contrast, it'll be front-side lighting, but if we're doing an interview or something like that, it could be a great look. So, right now, I'm just bringing in a big four-by-four of duvetyne. We call this a floppy, but it could be made out of immaterial. All it is doing is just trying to soak up the sun that's coming and bouncing off of this. It's allowing us to increase those contrast ratios. So, now you can see, like, oh, that looks great. And actually, it looks like it's done a lot to reduce the overall brightness of the scene because once that light comes in, bounces off the wall, bounces off the bounce, bounces off the, it just kind of keeps going, just kind of filling the space up, so. This by itself, totally usable. You can go with this, again. But Casey, when you're looking at this frame, is there anything else that you see? Yeah. I mean, we've got a decent exposure all around, but she's not really popping out that much. It just looks a bit two-dimensional. I'm gonna make one exception here because if you happen to bring one tiny pocket light or anything like that, where would you put it? In the back. Let's do it. All right, here we go. Let's see it, just to show the comparison. Up? Yeah, on. Yeah, no, it's nice. It's nice, right? We're looking really nice. We're looking great. You know what's the last thing that I would add? Is I would turn on these backlights over here. Oh, yeah. Just a little something like that. That looks nice. So, let's shoot a couple shots and we can get a couple, like, close-ups. Something like that? Yeah, sure, sure. Let's do it. All right, Katie, you ready? So, now that we've talked about how to use window light as a key, let's talk about the other problem that I see the most often, and that is when you have a window in the background. What I usually see people do is they'll stand right in front of a window, they'll stand like this, they'll shoot this way, and all of a sudden they'll have this crazy glowing light behind them, right? Or everything's just so, let's flip this around and let's talk about how to deal with that problem so you guys can never shoot like that ever again. Hopefully the internet looks just a little bit better. So, what are we looking at? We've got our talent sitting in, we've got a pretty decent exposure on her without doing any lighting, any setups, but our background is worthless. It's all gone. And I either am exposing for Katie right there, or I have to bring it down and expose for the outside of it. What do we do? Well, you know, when we're talking about big sets, we're talking about having budgets, we're talking about having equipment, so somebody would just bring in a crap ton of light. But we don't typically have that when we're working on our own, we're working with small budgets. So if we figure out how to knock down the intensity of what's outside the windows, what's coming through the windows. You know, one of the things that we can do is to block the light that's coming in. So now we can do that with actual curtains, we can do that with plants, we can do that with anything that can directly block the light. Now, some of the things that you can do that you can get away with in video that you can't in real life, is we could use darker material shades that are still translucent, like gray, and they'll still appear white, but they'll actually have a darkening effect. So now what we need to do is we need to cut the light that's coming through with more impressive methods. So we got some ND here. So how does this work? So neutral density is meant to cut out light transmission without affecting the quality. That's why they call it neutral density. It's not changing the colors, not changing the temperature of the light, it's just changing how much is coming through. So it's measured in stops. Those come out to 0.3 multiples, so you got 0.3, 0.6, 0.9, so on and so forth. This is 0.9, so this is gonna cut out three stops of light, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a phenomenal amount of light. So what we'll do is we'll roll this out on the far side to the near side, because hopefully whatever problems we introduce with cutting will be where we are least likely to see it. One of the things that we wanna bear in mind is we wanna be really careful with this, because the more we mark it up with fingerprints and bends and creases, the more those are gonna show up on camera. Yeah, exactly. I'm kind of perfect here. I'm a little bit long. Okay, so we can trim off some excess. So we officially have a piece of MD here cut. So the way we need to affix this in the best possible way to reduce it waving and shimmering while we're working is to apply it fully, like how people apply window tint. They use liquid material and adhesives to apply it, smooth it out, get it perfect, and then it should adhere fully. You're not trying to tint the windows forever. You're just trying to tint them for your shoot. So what you're gonna need for this is you're gonna need Windex and a squeegee. And the squeegee's basically just gonna be used to actually push out all the Windex from behind there. And so it's gonna help push out any wrinkles or crinkles or air bubbles and things like that to get caught underneath. Yeah, just a tiny bit closer, if you're able. Oh, yeah, okay. It's like applying the world's biggest phone protector. I know. Typically, this is done by a lot of your art departments, location departments. In the past, I've done this by merely taping it to the outside of whatever window I'm using. But obviously, that can be a bit of an issue when you're shooting on second stories or higher. I mean, the window looks way better. Does it look way better? Yeah. So a lot of film equipment is kind of made for rough handling, because they know it's gonna be used for years. This is one of the few things that you have to be super delicate with, because any time it wrinkles, it stays forever. So that's why I'm trying to make sure we don't bend it or crease it. This will last. Light it up a bit just to get the bottom set. Well, there's a whole nother career now. Filmmakers usually need to do everything. That one's significantly better. You can tell we've improved since the first one. So let's go back to our shot. Oh, my gosh. That was night and day. Yeah, it looks great. Yeah, I mean, I would say that this could probably get a little darker here in these blinds. Wanna just cheat it and put up something? We've got a floppy. Yeah, let's do that. So what we can do is knock it down a bit. We can also move this around so we can allow this to have some space, so it'll be more of like a really dark gray. And you can also use V-flats. V-flats are also basically just kind of, it's like foam core. It's like a type of cardboard. Some of the other ways that you could do this that are a little less labor-intensive is if you had net material, either, you know, bobbin net. That's, you know, the traditional, like, filmmaker net to reduce light. Or if you wanna use window screen replacement, which is something you can buy inexpensively from a home improvement store. Those are great, except in situations like this where it's significantly backlit, because those things will catch the actual light itself and just kind of keep you chasing. You're gonna see the net all of a sudden. Yeah, so it's gonna keep you chasing your own tail. So in situations like this, the ND gel's a great way to go. Do you wanna get some close-ups so we can get a couple different shots here while we're here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, sounds good, all righty. Casey, how you feeling? I'm honestly second-guessing myself. It felt too easy. I feel like we'd forgotten something, but. Katie, you look fantastic in this frame, by the way. Killer, killer, killer. So we didn't use any lights for this, by the way. Literally, we just worked with window light and what we had here. And again, so if you're wondering how to use a window light as a key light, or you've got these kind of nasty, blown-out windows in the background, you now know what to do. So Casey, one more time, what can we do to fix this? We can use things like window blinds. We can use V-flats or negative-fill material outside the windows to try and knock those things down. Or we can apply things directly to the windows, like the ND gel material or other net material. But this came out amazing, so. So again, don't forget, if you're shooting in a location with windows, you don't always need more expensive lights or expensive gear to be able to bring in. If you also work with what you have, you can cut down on the sunlight that's coming into those windows. And again, there's tons of beautiful, great-looking frames that you can get with that. So, without much further ado, Casey, if people have questions, where can they find you? Can they ask questions down below? Yeah, if you guys have any questions, feel free to put them in the comments section below. I try to check those as often as I can, just because we have a lot of great engagement there. Or you can connect with me on Instagram, at mcbrough underscore FTW. Right on. And then also, we're gonna put Katie's information down below as well, too. So if you wanna find her as well, you can follow her there. There you have it. That's Indy Muzzle. My name is Ted. Thank you so much for watching this episode. And of course, we will catch you guys in the next one. Indy Muzzle. And when you're ready. I just game dethrones us. What do you have? Hold on, I have my coconut water in the background. Take the, take the squeegee out, too. Take the, okay, good. Oh wait, hold on. Put this plant there. Come with me, Dave. Dave. Yay, Dave looks so happy there.