A lighting style incorporates multiple elements. How you light the face is the most important. Watch the video to see what’s the most popular style today:
What is a lighting style?
A lighting style incorporates multiple elements:
How you light the face is the most important:
- Whether it’s hard or soft lighting,
- what direction it’s from, and
- what the lighting contrast ratio is. The contrast ratio is the difference in stops between the key side and the shadow side.
You also have the difference between the foreground and the background, which is one of the ways cinematographers use to create depth and dimension in a frame.
What is the most common lighting pattern?
The most common lighting style is the Rembrandt lighting pattern.
The light, whether hard or soft, is placed at a forty-five degree angle to the side and top. This is very different to portrait lighting, where you can pose a person to perfection. In cinematography, actors move, faces look left and right, and the camera moves as well.
This system has one unique advantage. When an actor is lit with the Rembrandt pattern, and they look away, the lighting becomes a split lighting pattern. This still looks good on most actors.
Remember: Lead actors are almost always chosen for being photogenic. They don’t have to look beautiful or whatever, but they must pass the camera test. The big secret that most people don’t tell you at the beginning is, the lighting doesn’t matter when you have a beautiful face in front of you.
Pretty people look pretty in any lighting, just as they do in real life.
The 45-degree lighting style lets actors look away and even toward the light. When they look directly toward the light, the pattern becomes what is popularly known as the Paramount lighting style.
A lot of close ups in the early days of cinema were shot with the Paramount lighting pattern because it brings a pretty face forward and shows us all the beauty without major shadows. This lighting is also extremely popular in glamor and fashion photography.
So one light, positioned one way, gives us three lighting patterns, and the actors all look good. What if they turn away completely? Then the light becomes a backlight.
The backlight is most used in outdoor scenes. The majority of cinematographers I’ve analyzed over the years use backlight in day exterior scenes. It gives a great texture to everything around the actor, but also doesn’t create shadows on the actor’s face.
This gives cinematographers the freedom to create light through bounce or additional lights.
What is the most popular lighting contrast ratio?
Another important element of a lighting style is the contrast ratio of a face. This is the difference in stops between the key or lit side, and the shadow side. The most popular average is two stops. Two stops gives enough dramatic moulding to make faces three dimensional without over-dramatizing the shot.
For really dramatic shots, the contrast ratio can be pushed up, until the shadows are in total darkness. Gordon Willis often lit this way, with a very high contrast ratio of 4-5 stops.
Back to contrast ratios, a smaller contrast ratio than 2 stops, like one stop or zero stops (which is basically flat lighting) is also common in high key cinematography. It works great for comedy. Most films fall in the two stop contrast ratio because it’s neither too low key nor too high key.
Contrast between the foreground and background
The next big element in cinematography is the contrast difference between the face or foreground and the background. The most common difference between the foreground and background is one stop.
This allows the foreground to ‘pop’, if you will. The reverse is also possible, where the face is in darkness and the background is purposely lit. The extreme case of this is the silhouette, which is a very popular shot that you’ll find in most films at least once.
Typically faces are lit normally, with Caucasian skin tones going about one stop to two stops over middle grey, dark skin tones falling at middle grey or slightly lower, and everything else in between.
Skin tones definitely dictate lighting contrast ratios. Lighter skin is lit (or should be lit) differently to dark skin.
E.g., if you have a caucasian actor, you can expose normally and have the face in shadows in a high contrast ratio, and still see into the shadows. But with a darker face, if you try the same, the shadow region will completely go into black. So the lighting strategy must change, and some fill light will have to be brought in to get detail on that side of the face.
The modern trend for exposure
The ‘modern’ trend is to underexpose across the board, as you can see in many shows on Netflix, HBO, etc.
Personal take: This could be probably due to the fact many cinematographers/colorists/production companies don’t understand HDR, so what looks fine on an HDR monitor is underexposed on a normal TV. The jury’s out on that one.
Contrast ratios, like everything else in cinematography, are like colors and brushes. Let’s take zombie movies. You can have high key low contrast ratio movies like Shawn of the Dead. You can have medium contrast ratio movies like Zombieland, or you can amp up the contrast levels like you see in the original, Night of the Living Dead. Same genre, but three different styles.
Hard or soft lighting?
The last major element of cinematography lighting is hard or soft lighting. There is no right or wrong here.
In the earliest days of cinema you had very soft lighting, because the stages were lit with sunlight falling through muslin or other cloth. Then you had German expressionism which influenced film noir and the high contrast lighting style. In the 60s and 70s lighting became sort of mixed, but still more hard light because lighting tools dictated what you could practically achieve. You can see its influence even today in the works of Roger Deakins and Robert Richardson.
Today a lot of low budget films tend to use extremely soft light, similar to how it was in the early days of cinema.
Advantages of soft lighting
It’s easier and cheaper to light a scene for soft light, and you can shoot quickly because the actors can move around easier without many lighting changes. But that comes at the expense of using light as an expressionistic tool. There’s always a give and take.
These are all different brush strokes, depending on what kind of cinematographer you want to be.
To recap, the most popular lighting style currently, that you’ll find in the majority of films or web series, is:
- The 45-degree lighting pattern, either soft or hard, but mostly soft,
- a contrast ratio of two stops on the face, and
- about one stop between the foreground and background.
- Slightly underexposed
The thing about style is, it will change. In ten years who knows what the trend will be?
