Lighting The Burrow Log

Lighting outdoors can be easy, cheap and still look good. Here's a couple of things that we did on our recent outdoor shoot, The Burrow Log.

The first thing to do, is pick the time of day. Unless the story, calls for "the mid-day sun" to be" beating down, relentlessly" on the characters, I would recommend shooting either in the morning to early afternoon, or late afternoon to sundown. This is what we did for The Burrow Log.

We shot late afternoon to sundown. The sun is lower in the sky, and therefore, not as bright as the midday sun. Does that mean that your story has to take place during that time frame, not necessarily, most people won't realize that it is late in the afternoon, they'll just know that it is light outside, and therefore, daytime.


Another thing to remember is to always try and position the sun as a backlight on your talent. This is sometimes a hard habit to get into since the natural thing to do is position the light on the actors face. But if you put it behind the talent, the Sun will give a nice rim or "halo" effect on their hair.


The only two pieces of lighting equipment that we had, was a 3x3 ft. piece of foam core, and a black bedsheet. The foam core, or Bounce board, was used for just that, to bounce the light from the sun back onto the actors face. To give your image depth or shape, position the light source, in this case the bounce board, off to one side. We had it above our actor pointing down to give it a natural look. If the bounce is too low, it gives the spooky, campfire story feel.


So what was the black sheet for? Negative fill. I wanted more shape to the face so by using the black sheet, we cancelled out ambient light that was hitting the actors faces.

And that's pretty much it. I guess the only thing to add is what kind of camera rig we were shooting on so here you go. We used a Canon XHA1 with a Redrock Micro lens attachment, that's what gives the image so much depth of field. Those lens attachments aren't cheap, but it sure "ups" the production value.

All in all I think the shoot turned out great!

Check it out here, if you haven't already.