Welcome to thesubstream.com first episode of lighting basics. I’m Mike and I’m getting over the flu, so I apologized for the quality of my voice, and I’m going to be lighting my friend Ryo using a very simple, very basic and very common way to light for drama called Rembrandt lighting.
Unsurprisingly, Rembrandt lighting is named after Rembrandt Van Rijn who aside from being a titled with Van Rijn, also the title of best Dutch Painter of all time is known for using low-key lighting effects in his portraits.
In most of them, part of his subject’s face is thrown into shadow, but not completely as some detail elements. This is leads our history dudes to speculate on how Rembrandt had his studio set up, a row of windows above eye level letting sunlight in unto a subject’s face while a white wall opposite reflects the light back and fills in some of the shadows. Anyway, if you‘re most interested, you can go and research these steps to your heart content. I’m more interested in the practical applications.
In Cinematography, Rembrandt lighting is defined as a lighting set up. It produces a triangle of light under one of your subject’s eyes. That’s it that’s all if there’s a triangle form by the shadow of a dude or do that’s nose under their eye, it’s Rembrandt. Once you see the triangle once, you’ll see it everywhere if you start paying attention to lighting as it’s everywhere.
It’s a really handy thing to be able to create as it looks good on most people and it’s not very hard to do, and can give your images some depth as the shadows on your actors faces or to get fancy the Chiaroscuro, the interplay between light and dark will help with modeling which will take a word for it. We’ll make your compositions more engaging and more compelling. You can technically create this kind of lightning with one light into reflector, but most people do with two and we’re going to use a third light just for fun.
It all starts with the key light which in our case is a 500 watt Lowel Omni-light, naked up into our models right. This is the light that’s going to create a shadows and it’s also the light that’s going to be used to determine the exposure of the shot. As you can see, we’ve got some pretty intense Chiaroscuro going on, but the shadows are so dark that it looks kind of distracting so we’re going to light them up. We’ll do that with the second Omni which is going to serve as our fill light. Naked, the light just blast the other side of the face and all of the modeling, all of the shadows that show the contours of handsome Ryo’s face, and help to give it depth just disappear. So what we do is throw on a bunch of diffusion and a couple of neutral density gels to reduce both the intensity and the hardness of the light.
Now, we’re seeing something close to what Rembrandt kept painting. Generally speaking, in this kind of contouring intuitive, so listen close, but generally speaking, you want to favor this shadow outside of the face when you’re shooting. Light the far sided of the face especially if you’re looking for drama. What remains is to transform my Rembrandt set up into a standard free light set up. We’re going to put a third light, a Lowel Tota behind Ryo, shooting towards the camera. What this will do hopefully is rim Ryo’s unlit shoulder and hair with a little bit of light again, providing some Chiaroscuro, and helping to pick him out from the dark background. It’s that simple really. You can do it with one bright lamp and a piece of white cardboard or the sun and a reflector, key, fill and if you like a backlight.
Thanks for watching. If you have any questions, head over to our forms and ask a way. And the first person to name a film that successfully used Rembrandt lighting will win a donut that I will mail to their house.
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