How to Set Up Interviews Using Only Natural Light
Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t use lights. Lights give you control over your scenes and open up possibilities to stretch your creativity. But there are many situations I find myself in without access to lights. Primarily on travel assignments. Lights are typically big, expensive and cumbersome. It’s important to understand the basics of light and how you can utilize natural light to make a shot look appealing to your viewer. Especially with an interview. I spent my first couple years as a videographer with very no lights in my kit. Honestly it’s mostly because I didn’t know how to use lights. My work with natural light helped me learn how light works, how to manipulate it, how to control it, so that after a while when I started to add lights to my scenes, I knew exactly how I wanted to use them.
Learning to use natural light not only benefits professional videographers, but any business owners looking to take their content up a level. Do your reels look flat or dark? Do you record yourself sometimes and think, “why do I look like I have dark shadows under my eyes?” This can be remedied with a simple understanding of lighting and takes no investment in fancy lights or equipment.
The Basics: 3 Point Lighting
The first lighting technique every professional videographer learns is called 3 point lighting. It’s accomplished by using, you guessed it, 3 light sources. There are hundreds of ways and combinations to manipulate these 3 light sources, but for the sake of the basics I’m just going to go over the standard way you set up 3 point lighting.
KEY LIGHT
Your first light source in this set up is your key light. This is the strongest light of the three, your main light. Typically you want this light in front of your subject at a 90 degree or 3/4 angle. Meaning not directly in front of your subject but off to the side. Placing a light directly in front of your subject creates a flat look meaning it lacks the three dimensionality we are trying to achieve. Shadows are a part of our visual world. They say just as much as light in cinema. Believe it or not your goal with lighting is not to eliminate all the shadows. Your goal is to balance light with shadow to create a three dimensional image. When you place your key light at an angle to your subject, you’ll notice little to no shadows on the side of your subjects face closest to the key light, with the shadows getting more and more pronounced as the light moves across your subjects face. You always want to start with your key light and dial in your exposure to the bight side of the face. Don’t tray to eliminate shadows in camera, that’s going to make your subject look too “hot.” Once you have your key light and exposure set up, it’s time to add our next light.
FILL LIGHT
Your second light source is your fill light and it goes on the other side of your key light. This is how you manipulate that shadow on your subjects face. Notice I said manipulate and not eliminate. You don’t want to eliminate that shadow you want to manipulate how much shadow you actually have on a subjects face.
Shadows say a lot. If you look at a film like the Godfather you’ll notice in most scenes one side of a characters face is covered with a bright hard light, while the other is completely dark. This is to represent the two opposing worlds the characters live in. The light side represents the world as we know it with the values we’ve come to expect from productive members in society. Family, honor, hard work. While the dark side represents the criminal underworld they also live in. An underworld riddled with crime and questionable morals. For these shots cinematographer Gordon Willis added no fill light. In fact Gordon used what are called flags to keep light off the characters faces so that they are completely dark on the opposite side of his key light.
But I’m getting into more advanced lighting there, let’s bring it back to the basics. Needless to say your interview is probably not with a seedy gangster. So we want nice balanced lighting that makes our subject look good. A fill light is typically at 25%-50% the power of your key light. Its purpose is to fill in that shadow on the opposite side of your subject’s face so that it’s not too dark. Sometimes we don’t even use a light as our fill, but a bounce board. Basically a big white piece of styrofoam that bounces some of the light from your key light back onto the subjects face. How much shadow you want on your subject is artistic preference, but I’d say “subtle shadow” is proper.
HAIR LIGHT
The final light is what’s known as a hair light, or kicker, or backlight. I’ll call it a hair light here since that’s what it’s doing, lighting your subjects hair. This light is behind your subject, usually around the same power as your fill light, pointed at the back of your subjects head. Typically it’s placed on the same side as your key light. Lighting the back of your subject like this separates them from the background and makes them stand out in your frame.
How to achieve 3 point lighting using only natural light
OUTSIDE
Now that we understand 3 point lighting, how do we achieve this with no lights? Let’s start outside before moving inside. Natural lighting revolves around one object, the sun. That’s all this is, positioning your subject in the proper relation to the sun. So we’re outside, middle of the day, not a cloud in the sky, where does the sun go? You might say to yourself, “well the sun is a powerful light so it must be the key light, let’s put it in front.” You’re right the sun is a powerful light, a really really really powerful light. It’s too powerful. In cinema there’s a saying, “the eyes are the window to the soul.” We need to see your subjects eyes in an interview and when you place the sun in front of your subject, it’s going to be really difficult for them to keep their eyes open.
So the sun is going to go behind your subject at a 90 degree angle off their shoulder, where your hair light usually would go. Because of the power of the sun you’re going to instantly get something close to three point lighting. The light of the sun will wrap around your subjects face giving the side favoring it more light like a key light, and the other side more shadow. How much shadow will depend on the time of day, if there are any clouds etc.. Natural light is great, but there’s a reason we use lights. Lights give us control. So remember when using natural light, some of it is out of your hands. You may be able to place your subject close to a white wall, or there may be snow on the ground, but your “fill light” is going to be somewhat out of your control. Just like the shadows cast by trees change throughout the day, so too will the shadows on your subjects face. But hey this isn’t a bad thing! Your shot will look natural and like it belongs to that particular time of day.
This isn’t an article about framing, but framing and lighting go hand in hand so we need to touch on this quickly. When framing your interview usually I follow the rule of thirds. This is the most basic concept of framing in cinema and photography. You will usually place your subject in 1/3 of the frame, with them looking towards the more empty 2/3 portion of the frame. Going back to wanting your subject to be able to see, you want them looking away from the sun.
Sometimes turning your subject away from the sun isn’t enough. It could be a hot day (you don’t want your subject dripping sweat), or snow on the ground could be blinding. In these cases you’ll want to put your subject in the shade. This lighting won’t be very dynamic but it will be soft and pleasing on the skin tones. When placing your subject in the shade you’ll need to make sure your background is in the shade as well. A bright background will cause exposure issues.
INSIDE
When inside we’re looking for a window. The bigger the better. Now pretend the window is the sun. The difference between a window and the actual sun is the varying degrees of strength window light can have. If the sun is low in the sky coming directly through the window, you’ll have a lot of light and need to set up similar to outdoor lighting with the window slightly behind them off their shoulder. If the sun is on the other side of the building, you may need to place the window in front of your subject at a 90 degree angle in the traditional 3 point lighting manner.
Windows can have diffusion attached to them in the form of curtains or blinds, giving you some control on how much light to let in and what kind of light to let in (hard or soft). You may have a big window with the sun blasting through (hard light), but the window has white curtains that you can pull closed. Now you have a flattering soft light, and you can place your subject facing this light source.
If you’re confused or feel like there are too many variables with a window, don’t worry. The simple thing to remember is to place the window on the side of your subject. Once there it’s easy to see if you need the window slightly behind them, or in front of them.
You’re not gonna read some blog and instantly be a lighting expert, go play with it. Play is truly the best way to learn videography. Make some Tik Toks of yourself, mess around in your house. You’ll figure out natural light in no time.
