shooting at night?

[paulytwonames]

I am shooting a night scene on a bed of fake snow with a Sony HVR-A1E and only a couple of tungston lights! Can anyone tell me how I can get decent results without burning out all of my subjects flesh tones and getting reasonable colour and decent contrast?

Any help would be much appreciated.

[RFBurns]

Howdy!

Sounds like you need defussion filters on the lights. But you would also want adequate background lighting so that your primary elements in the video wont be "lightwashed". This effect occurs because the target (people) are lit up and the surroundings are not, making the camera jack up its gain on the CCD imagers to bring out the backgrounds.

You could try manual iris instead of auto. Adjust the iris setting so that your targets are not lightwashed. Then use "fill-in" lights to bring out any background scenery you want in frame.

Movie makers use alot of neat tricks to compensate for lighting problems. They use things like reflectors, defussion screens on the lights, and extra fill-in lighting to get an overall picture that has evenly spread light.

A light meter would come in handy for this task, making adjusting the lights and defussion filters a breeze. The goal is to get an even indication on the light meter as you move it through the scene area with the targets in position.