Bright, soft light served as our key light for this laid-back cooking spot.

Our key was two Aputure 300DMii lights and both had a 2X Fresnel attached to them. To keep our foot print manageable, the two Aputure lights were mounted to a single stand by using a triple header.

This project was shot in two separate locations (filmed at the same time). We filmed Adrienne Bailon’s section with Clarence Fuller as the director and myself as both DP and Gaffer.

To solve the problem of where to light, we looked at the room and the blocking and landed on keying our talent from camera right.

For power, we blasted two Aputure 300DMII lamps with Fresnel 2X attachments, set to spot. These dual Aputure 300MII lamps were diffused with a 4’x6′ artificial silk.

Luckily the back wall was not completely closed off and because of this, we were able to boom a light just above the rear wall, to serve as our hair light (Aputure 300X set to something low, like 5%).

I wanted to motivate the Key light from some source in our frame, but timing did not allow for that. Instead, we have the key on the camera right side, and our key not motivated. Instead it is serving as a window that is just out of frame.

Originally, I wanted to key our light from camera left (and motivate from the outdoor window), but the refrigerator was returning too much light. The refrigerator bouncing light back at our talent was a problem.

Normally, we could flag the light from the fridge, but the refrigerator was in our shot, so flagging the bounced, hard light from the fridge was not an option.

Our solution: just key the light from camera right.

By rigging our lighting in this way, we were able to get a lighting ration of roughly 2:1 on our talent’s face.

We also have (roughly) a 2:1 lighting ration from our foreground to background.