Dramatic Storytelling | When to Use Hard Lighting
Understanding how different types of light affects your subject can be essential in creating a look that can help improve your skills as a cinematographer. Today, we will be discussing the characteristics of hard light, the differences between hard and soft light and best situations to utilize hard light in a scene.
The Basics of Hard Light
Hard light is a quality of light that produces hard shadows with crisp edges, revealing depth and texture on the illuminated subject. Contrary to soft light, which conceals depth and texture with soft edge shadows. Soft light is much better than hard light at wrapping around a talent’s face, but hard light is better at showing definition in your talents’ face or body. This characteristic is perfect for showcasing edgy features like a sharp jawline or muscular definition. More often than not, hard light is more commonly associated with male talent, but hard light can also be used with female talent to express feelings of mystery or intense facial features.How to Create Hard Light
Hard light is created by manipulating the size and distance of a light source. If you’re familiar with the conditions of creating soft light- the bigger the source of light to a subject or closer the distance to a subject, the softer the light. Hard light is achieved with smaller sources of light or from further distances from a subject. The further a light source is from the subject, the harsher the shadows. The sun is a great source of hard light, although it is enormous in size, it’s also millions of miles away, thus making it a smaller source. Keep in mind the sun is natively a hard source when not covered, add in cloud cover and you’ll get a much softer and diffused source of light. For more info on using the sun as a light source, we’ll cover it in another episode.How to Harden Soft Light
When it comes to softening hard light, it’s a very easy and simple process, add diffusion, silks, soft boxes and such in front of a hard light source. For hardening soft light it’s a much more difficult process and depending on your shooting location, it might be extremely difficult. There are only two options, one is to move your light source further away from your subject and the other is to bounce your soft light off a smaller object like a reflector or mirror to act as your new source of light. For example, the Aputure 120d with Light Dome together makes for a beautiful soft source of light, but if one were to bounce that light off a smaller 17” silver reflector it will produce a much harder source of light compared to shining the 120d and Light Dome directly at a subject.Subscribe to Aputure:
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