Waxing Poetic and Lighting Cinematic

Recently I hauled the lights out into the inky darkness of night to fire off some test shots for an upcoming project. The idea behind the shot in question was to pay homage to a very dramatic moment that has been played on the silver screen (in countless films) for decades. But as I was setting up, it occured to me that I had often seen such night scenes over-lit. By this I mean that the darkness of night was often lit by millions of watts of blue-gelled HMI's, and somehow wound up looking like it happened in a football stadium. Not only would something like this be nearly impossible with small monolights - but I was not sure I really wanted to go in that direction after all.
When we go outside in real life, night is DARK. It is, after all, NIGHT. So the question of how to light this project suddenly became one of how to creatively draw attention to the subject - the narrative of the piece - but still keep it looking reality based. After mulling over the main idea for the whole thing, I was struck with a pretty awesome idea as to how to approach it. One that covered all the bases and will still look not only dramatic, but call to mind exactly the cinematic approach the image screams for.
So what is all this about, anyway? What is the shot that I am working on? Stay tuned...... This one should be pretty cool!

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C. M. Franke | Photography

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