DANGEROUS Lighting – Capturing a Predator!!!

Today on The Slanted Lens we’re deep in the jungles of Los Angeles! We’re going to do a female cosplay image from Predator with cosplayer Alicia Marie @aliciamariebody!

We’re going to show you how we lit it, how we did the dry ice and smoke, and the colors we use to create this image. So let’s get started!

LIGHTING BREAKDOWN

The original thought was a Godox 400 into a V Flat on the camera left hand side. What that’s going to do is when it bounced into that V Flat it wraps and it’s a much softer light than going through a softbox. It’s more like an umbrella type look – giving us a nice soft look. It’s not very directional and I don’t want it to be. I want it to be a light that looks organic just bouncing around in this jungle scene. So that’s our key light.

I then put the two Godox 400s, one on each side with the Industrial Vapor Gels on them. These are meant to back light the smoke.

Unless there’s something shining through that smoke, it doesn’t really give us the depth that we want. The problem we get into is the smoke can be too bright, so we dialed the lights down until it set the right look.

I kept it very slow because I was at 1/15 of a second at F5, so F5 gave me enough depth of field to hold her outfit, but a 1/16 of a second gave me enough of an exposure to drag in the shutter to burn in that source 4 in the background.

Source 4 is a tungsten-based light and you can see how that gives us a lot of depth. The warmth in the background is coming into the greens and fills that smoke in the foreground.

Then in the front we stuck we stuck an LED that just really gave us that great green up front. We put a grid on it to cut a lot of the green and balance it, and now it looks fabulous.

SMOKE

The smoke in the foreground, we used a chill box to create! A chill box is just a smoke machine running through a cooler that has a slab or dry ice in there, so smoke moves across the dry ice and it puts it right on the ground because it’s so cold. It’s just a great look.

So that sat on the water in the foreground and we could fan it to come up on her and loft up in the foreground.

We have 2 smoke machines, one on each side, running through a fan because it breaks it up and makes it less directional feeling – more of a haze kind of look.