Lessons on properly lighting dark-skinned actors from “Insecure” director of photography Ava Berkofsky
Sep 15, 2017
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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How to properly light the model depends on several aspects, and one of them is skin color. Insecure’s director of photography, Ava Berkofsky, makes the actors in the series look fabulous. In this 2-minute video, she shares her lessons on properly lighting the dark-skinned actors to achieve the best results.
As Ava tells The Mic, when she was in film school, no one ever talked about lighting nonwhite people other than in terms of a few general rules. The conventional way is to “put the skin tones around 70 IRE.” However, as Ava points out, this would make the rest of the image look weird and too bright.
Ava also told The Mic that she taught in film school to always use amber or green light on models with dark skin. However, she disagrees with this, because there’s no universal rule that will work with all dark skin types. She points out that it was always stressed out that lighting bright skin is “different.” She considers it wrong because it makes Caucasian type the standard that “different” is measured from.
So, what are the techniques she uses to light the actors and make them and the entire scene look just right?
First of all, she says a lot of it lies in making the skin reflective. You need to make sure that the makeup artist uses a reflective base on the skin.
Secondly, you need to give skin something to reflect. It’s not about the amount or intensity, but think about the surface of the light.
Thirdly, Ava uses a polarizing filter. This helps shape the light in an amazing way when you’re working with reflective skin and surfaces.
To be perfectly honest, this is a topic that has never crossed my mind before. Simply, where I live, most of the people are the Caucasian type, so I never gave it a thought what it would take to light a model with dark skin. Therefore, I found these tips from Ava Berkofsky really interesting. Of course, they’ll also be useful for all portrait photographers or cinematographers working with models with dark skin.
[via The Mic]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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2 responses to “Lessons on properly lighting dark-skinned actors from “Insecure” director of photography Ava Berkofsky”
“Lesson one, turn up the light” the end
I see this is perpetuating the recent myth that film scientists used Shirley targets to formulate color response. That’s balderdash. Film scientists at the front end of the process determined then and now whether color response was accurate using very tightly controlled color targets and measuring the numbers. And there were more companies than just Kodak, btw–Agfa, Ansco, and Fuji, for instance–and Fuji certainly never used a Kodak Shirley to manufacture Fujichrome.
Film scientists were all about the numbers, not about Caucasian skin tone. Shirleys were used at the back end of the process by still commercial and personal color printers, and even then the top labs used densitometers to measure the response numbers from the fixed color and gray targets in the picture–not the woman’s skin tone–to determine whether they were getting the numbers right.
I’ve been photographing black people for 40 years and never needed “reflective” makeup. I can’t imagine such a thing providing a natural appearance (at least not in a still image). In fact, by claiming that some kind of “reflective” makeup is needed, that’s the same as saying special lighting is needed.
Speaking in old-school Zone terms, dark skin important shadows would run around Zone 3, Caucasian important highlights would run around Zone 8. A good photographer can light for that–and it’s all in the lighting. Back in the day, schools used to teach photographers to light and expose an egg on velvet–and get detail in both.