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Working with Gels
For those who do it regularly, would you care to comment? The main part is his take away, that working with gels is so tricky that it means really learning lighting. This is his last paragraph. Makes sense to a point, but I do not do gels enough to judge. I would suspect that Durrel style Noir would also require really, really knowing light. This is from Jake Hicks. *JHP Newsletter Number 29* *February - March 2019* Welcome and let's jump straight into this one. I think it's probably fair to say that a lot of you here are following my work because you at least have a cursory interest in gelled lighting. Now that doesn’t mean you're obsessed with coloured lighting like me, but it does mean you've probably given it a go at least once or twice. Maybe you loved it, maybe you found it tricky and maybe you weren't too happy with your results. No matter your level of interest in gelled lighting, I think we can all agree that it's pretty tricky to get consistently excellent results when working with gels. So why bother struggling with gels? If it's too hard to get great looking gelled lighting shots, why not just stick to regular white-light shots? Last month I had a one-to-one session with another photographer and they had asked me to show them some of my slightly softer, pastel looking gelled lighting setups from my Creatively Simple Lighting Workshop <http://2z68u.r.a.d.sendibm1.com/mk/cl/f/0UpYdteReCiFaJbPKwJqYytfqbl0boPQXwZM4menqqWyTGPwdW7cEj1_noaC3I-BIa7iT46Iis7z9CN8W6O3Mu9yQpQjDqFLRIlj-8-_DdHjnacYtysmdw0k-FHUpHyvebjvrNpptBn4jeiJF_bp4UbSKQ-YTKJo1j_iYYsdKkMfRqMZvD7YHz0FnFB8GdX629ai8h_pp3ScX1saFsFHOX3yr4Y>. Below you'll see two shots of the raw, back of camera shots of what we setup and shot together that day. On the left is the pastel gelled setup I originally shot, but it's actually the right hand shot that I found most interesting. After we'd shot the pastel gel setup, the photographer I was working with asked me if we could take the gels off of the lights and shoot it without the gels on. I was at first a little hesitant of his blatant heresy, because not only have I never shot this setup without gels, but I was very cautious as to what it would look like without them. <http://2z68u.r.a.d.sendibm1.com/mk/cl/f/zsjVU4k1iXGVkeP2jNoOKa-iqLkrBthrXaOfM-kyF_Dd4g0FrMgcj_HwxvWSXr_N9ABWw2zk2hgn04sGjLfdUkTvMa9GymT4pzWsPIXXfZp3l2j04H1n03pVcSJ7A2RnxkpDuupx8UZsrAM0UL32Gs-lxYiGi_S4ntVpV1zMO4I_IasByR6MiebNALbQ0k0RrSgVOvqMNwL-P0YoANIxKnhRoTA> /*On the left we have the regular pastel gels setup, and on the right is the exact same setup and settings... just minus the gels.*/ So what's so interesting about this? Well for me, it just proves how powerful gels can be when it comes to teaching you how to light. The gels on the left force you to be very accurate and considered with your light placement and modifier choice. I personally feel that it's these factors that are easily overlooked when we shoot with just white light alone. *The Moral of the Story* Get good at lighting with gels, and even if you decide to never use them again, your overall lighting craft will skyrocket. Gels are incredibly unforgiving, so if you can light a subject well with gels, you can very easily light with white light far more accurately. Mar 19 19 12:23 pm Link If by “do it regularly,” you mean use gels during most shoots, I don’t. But here’s my $.02 anyway. The smaller the highlight areas and the larger the shadows, the more precise the lighting placement needs to be. Imo, gels are used most effectively in small areas of highlights (like from rim lights). So the lighting placement needs to be fairly precise. I’ve used gels more for coloring backgrounds than anything else. You can turn a white, gray or black background any color using gels. However, no matter which of those colors the background is, before you can do that (without getting muddy, washed-out colors), you first need to turn the background black. That means that, when you shoot the subject with all lights on except the background light(s), the background should show up in the image as black. So you need to use distance from the background, barn doors, flags, V-flats or whatever to keep those lights from reaching the background before shooting with a gelled background. Mar 19 19 05:53 pm Link We published an article by Jake that covers this topic. https://www.modelmayhem.com/education/p … hotography Mar 19 19 06:10 pm Link Still would like user comments. I have seen many an article on XYZ, where in my world things did not work out like XYZ. Even with things as straightforward as 'this button does this on your camera', which might actually work if you were starting with a camera at factory presets. And thanks for the link to the edu. Gels are an occasional thing with me. Usually do not work that well, but if it really is going to improve my overall lighting, then perhaps I need to do more. Mar 19 19 06:54 pm Link Rather difficult to comment without being able to see the images. However, I suspect that his point is not so much that lighting with gels is trickier but rather that having different gels on different lights can help you distinguish what each light is actually contributing to the image which may be more difficult for the untrained eye to see with all white light. If different colored light overlaps on the subject, it affects the color you see so you would have to be very careful to control that, something you may not focus on with all white light. Being able to see this more distinctly and focus on it will help you with learning lighting. Mar 19 19 07:36 pm Link As I've just received My first set I recently watched (and bookmarked) this vid by Daniel Norton on Gels for future reference. His final images are quite good. https://youtu.be/ajDiqdh1tQs Thanks for sharing the info Herman et al, I'm really looking forward to seeing what mess I can create with mine  Mar 20 19 04:14 am Link FIFTYONE PHOTOGRAPHY wrote: Watched a couple of times over the last while. Mar 20 19 12:39 pm Link Herman Surkis wrote: I haven’t seen your photos, but I’m guessing that the gelled light is a rim light. Mar 20 19 01:35 pm Link Camerosity wrote: Yep seems to work. Mar 20 19 03:22 pm Link Herman Surkis wrote: No. It was from one of his Creative Live courses. I have six of his CL courses. I was jumping around from one course to another, looking for something else, when I saw that. Apparently it went right over my head the first time around. I don't recall which course it was in. Mar 20 19 04:34 pm Link I loved Gels and Fog. I miss it. Mar 20 19 05:21 pm Link Camerosity wrote: Never lived in Cincinnati. And not likely anybody with my name. Mar 20 19 06:01 pm Link PhillipM wrote: Still do. Need to use more, except they are too uncontrollable, unless you use them enough to really get it. And gels are more controllable than smoke/fog. Mar 20 19 06:11 pm Link Camerosity wrote: This is because as you move the light towards the back, you get more direct reflection which is stronger than the diffuse reflection you get from the front or side. Mar 20 19 08:30 pm Link I use gels in every shoot. Studio or location. They are my color palette.   And that's because I come from a moving picture background, in which every light is pretty much gelled in some manner. Mar 20 19 09:15 pm Link Jorge Kreimer wrote: Today with the new software, a lot of what you did can be done in post. Mar 21 19 02:13 pm Link Herman Surkis wrote: Smoke and fog can be controlled better using movie smoke machines and fog instead of photography stuff. The bad news is it's oil base and leaves residue everywhere. The good news is you can make fog anywhere and it stays there pretty well, even in light breeze. It's also a lot more expensive than the rosco smoke machines. Mar 22 19 03:22 am Link The best ideas and tips are useless if you cannot remember anything when you are actually shooting. During the shoot crap. Total waste of time. During cleanup decided to leave a couple of lights up and run some gel tests. 1.5 hours later with my faithful patient model Mandy (mannequin). It is brilliant. But does point out how easy it is to go wrong. And As Hicks says, gels are very, very unforgiving, and I could instantly see where I was getting unwanted spill and crossover. But it is not as difficult as I make it, if one remembers a few points before the shoot, not after the shoot. Like do Not let the gelled areas get contaminated by white light. Or any other light. Set up the gels and expose for the gels. Any other lights have to fit in to the gelled exposure. If you are going to mix white and gelled light, you had better be careful, and you had better be good at flagging the lights. And mostly, you need to remember what you need to do during the shoot. Mar 26 19 01:31 am Link I don't know, but I remember when gels where used for industrial shoots and got super played out. Now they are all the rage again for portraits. When done well quite beautiful. Ironically, when done well they remind me of old black and white movies. Like, Alfred Hitchcock films where you had to create depth with light because there was no color to save you. Although later on they had technicolor but still chose to shoot in black and white. Lighting creating depth. Current well executed gel techniques remind me of monochrome is what I'm saying. Precision. Mar 28 19 07:21 pm Link I am not really sure what the question is, but I enjoy using gels. Studying color theory will give you some ideas on what gel combinations work well together. Green background, orange subject Blue background, yellow rim light etc. Use colors to show the environment influencing the subject. Is it golden hour with orange on the horizon? Is it winter with blue sky overhead? Is it the glow of a fireplace? Is it a glowing TV light? Is it a bar with a neon sign nearby? Colors can be very saturated and sciencefictiony. (keep stray light away so it stays pure) Or they can be pastel and subtle. (bouncing white light off a colored surface gives nice pastel look.) You can use the gel on a small area and use global temperature changes to affect the whole scene. For example put the camera in tungsten mode and then put CTO on the strobes. The surface you are shooting also responds to different colored light. Try shooting a blue gel at blue paper to get a super saturated blue background. But a red light aimed at the same paper will be absorbed and the result will be black. Have fun washing out the colors selectively. Try putting a blue gel on a fill light and leave your main light white. The result will be the main light overpowers the blue everywhere it touches, but the shadows will be blue. Gelled light can be tricky to meter. Back in the bad old film days I kept reference slides for each color gel. Red was a pain - meter recommendation would be off by about 3 stops. This is not such a problem now with instant digital feedback. Mar 29 19 03:53 pm Link The original question, sort of, was do people who work with gels feel this is true... "Get good at lighting with gels, and even if you decide to never use them again, your overall lighting craft will skyrocket. Gels are incredibly unforgiving, so if you can light a subject well with gels, you can very easily light with white light far more accurately." However the whole thread has become an edu course on working with gels. Cool, but adds more work to my life.  I am going to spend an afternoon experimenting. To hopefully get better. Getting good at all the suggestions would take the better part of a year. Mar 29 19 04:50 pm Link I bought a Sekonic L-858D-U meter and asked some tech questions about using it and HSS. Ended up on their emailing list and got these about using gels. Found them interesting and passing them along. https://youtu.be/gMrr0fRAC5c https://youtu.be/D2sYNwXga54 Nov 12 19 07:14 am Link GRMACK wrote: The problem with those videos is that he is using incident light metering on a white background. I used to make the same mistake and my photos where not as saturated as I wanted them. And I had to make a lot of adjustments and wasted time doing so to get the desired saturation. So, I watched a video of Dean Collins and he explains that you have to use reflective light metering to turn any color background to 18% gray. That way your gels would be the right color. If you want more saturation, you simply underexpose. Nov 12 19 08:55 am Link These just turned up in my inbox. https://jakehicksphotography.com/latest … ls-exposed https://jakehicksphotography.com/latest … ackgrounds https://jakehicksphotography.com/latest … background There are others. But I find Jake tends to be the most concise. "So, I watched a video of Dean Collins... " Famous last words from people who have a lighting problem that they want to fix. And then they fix it. Nov 12 19 09:36 am Link Here is the video I watched and it explains everything. I recommend watching it over and over again until you understand that Dean Collins is right. It all comes down to the two types of light metering: incident and reflective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZRXeapj3o The first two minutes are very important and also pay closer attention at 10:00 minute. Nov 12 19 01:21 pm Link Voy wrote: I have most of Deans' stuff, bought and downloaded. Between Dean and "Light:Science and Magic", almost everything lighting can be answered. However i need to see the same info. repeated several times in various ways till it clicks. Thus I look at others stuff Nov 12 19 03:43 pm Link Voy wrote: Thanks Voy for the Dean Collin's link. I watched all of it. Nov 13 19 07:58 am Link GRMACK wrote: I recommend getting the Rosco CalColor kit. They are calibrated to "Cancel" each other out when combined properly. For example Yellow and Blue cancel each other out, Green and Magenta cancel each other out, and Cyan and Red cancel each other out. It is basically the same thing your camera does with the white balance. Like when shooting on tungsten lighting, your camera will add blue because the light is yellow. For fluorescent lighting your camera will add magenta because the light is green. Nov 13 19 12:17 pm Link My main use for gels is to match a flash to the ambient light. One thing I've found is that in some cases I prefer the colors you get when you might lighting, but with the intent of making it look as normal as possible. As far as colored lighting in photos, I prefer using LED lights that are either red, green, blue or UV, I find the opposite is true in that what's the point of using colors if you're not going to really use them. Go crazy and be reckless with them. That's when it's the most interesting. Overlapping and getting colors from blending is really cool. I've found that I tend to like faces left alone, either natural or just a mild shade, like yellow or amber. Green skin almost never works. The other thing that's really interesting is using colored lights or gels and then converting to B&W. It can make for some really amazing contrast. One last thing I've found can be really helpful is an ultra contrast filter. I like them for all sorts of things. The slight reduction in contrast cuts the saturation slightly and that can keep it in a range the sensor is better able to handle. Nov 20 19 12:11 am Link |
