3 Different Ways to Light Faces | Filmmaker’s Guide

Stay tuned to the end for a chance to win a prize! In this episode of 4MFS, we present Valentina with three different people and ask her what is the best way to light each of their faces. We are lighting for a fashion video, beauty ad, and liquor commercial. Valentina takes color contrast, quality of light, and genre into consideration to produce the most pleasing image. We’re also joined by Kevin Reyes, guest DP extraordinaire, who is here to lend his expertise in fashion cinematography. We are using a luxury downtown LA loft for our set, and we have three people we need to light - a young black male, an Asian woman, and an elderly white gentleman. The most important factor for each of them is whether we light them with a hard or soft key light. For the first setup, we decide to go with a hard light because we want to emphasize the texture in darker skin tones. Valentina attaches a fresnel to the LS 300d II in order to spot the light and get the shape that she was looking for. In the second setup, we set u