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Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens, we’re going to show you how to take harsh sun, and turn it into a beautiful soft keylight, using a translucent reflector.
Let’s take a look at the footage we shot, out at a vintage air museum, of Erica Gore, and show you how you can take that harsh sunlight that we encountered there, and turn it into a beautiful wrapping keylight.
The key to making this work is getting your talent in the right place. I’m going to walk around and find the shadow side of the object. So I’m looking into the shadow’s side of the objects in the background, I’m going to place my talent up front, then I’m going to move in that 180-degree area to where I get the sun so it’s just slightly behind her. Just slightly. I’ll be able to see that Rembrandt lighting develop on her face as I look around her. That’s my spot.
I put in my 39 x 72-inch reflector by Photoflex, that beautiful light is going to wrap around her face, she’s going to look gorgeous. I love this reflector because it’s long and tall like a person so you get to cover the entire figure with it. So I’m going to bring that in now. I’ve already seen where that Rembrandt’s going to fall on that left-hand side. I now put my reflector in between the sun and her, and I get this beautiful wrapping sunlight on her face. The closer I can get the reflector to her, the better the light wraps and the prettier it looks.
The nice thing about when you find your spot where the sun and your talent are in the right place, is you’re now looking into the darker part of the sky. So when I change my exposure to accommodate for the translucent reflector coming in, I’m going to open up, and the sky doesn’t blow out in the background. So I get a very pretty image. So when I put in my translucent reflector, I’ve got to open up my exposure. When I do that, the sky’s not going to get blown out.
So there’s a quick tip from The Slanted Lens on how to turn that harsh sunlight into a soft, beautiful keylight using a 39 by 72-inch reflector by Photoflex.
Keep those cameras rollin’, keep on clickin’.
-Jay P.
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