If you’ve spent even a little time in the film and photo world you’ve probably heard someone throw around the phrase “wow that looks so cinematic!” While film and photography ultimately have their own desired outcomes when it comes to aesthetics, making an image look and feel cinematic really comes down to one thing: creating visual depth.
One of the principle jobs of a cinematographer isn’t just to shoot the scene but to help guide the viewer’s eye to the action and subject matter of the frame. When working with moving scenes or imagery where there may be a lot going on, sculpting depth in a way that helps keep people focused on the action is essential to telling a story. Not only that, but depth reveals character, vulnerability— it helps depict or enhance an emotional life not always seen. It’s hard to relate to a flat image, but to also try to feel something from it too? Good luck.
At their disposal, most directors of photography will look towards lighting as their main tool in creating depth within a frame. With lighting, you can build separation between your subject and the camera; you can direct people’s focus, you can highlight some physical features and mask others— light creates and dismantles illusion. A lot of people think that gear is the answer to create cinematic looking images, but in my opinion the answer is all (mostly) in lighting. Gear can help expand the depth you build, but if you’re not building or designing your images with depth in the first place then there’s not much more where you can go.
The easiest way to start designing cinematic lighting set ups is to start by shooting against your light. This creates contrast and contrast is the visual representation of conflict or drama! Most young photographers and filmmakers are conditioned to think that more lights are better— that every angle of a person’s face must be lit and bright. But this isn’t the case! When you do this, you are denying your image of dimension. Less can be more. Instead, start with a single light and put your subject between you, the light source, and the camera. Now, add in more light sources to help bring all the details needed into the scene.
Take for example the scene below I shot for a trailer of a book releasing soon:
The following was shot with just a single light mounted to the ceiling above the door frame. It might feel tempting to shoot light down the hallway directly onto the subject’s faces but doing so would completely destroy the beautiful gradients of shadow and color in the frame. There also wouldn’t be any motivation for a light like that to be there. It would feel unnatural, awkward and would make everything on the same plane. Instead, a simple light placed above and behind the subjects of the scene was enough to light the entire moment.
The same is true for this moment, except obviously the motivating light source was the early morning sun. Shooting against the sun, within the interior of the Lincoln Memorial helped bend light in a way where you get a frame within a frame and color wrapped in a gradient.
In this frame, we actually only had the diffusion of the early morning sunlight through the trees, a very minimal small setup in a local park. And yet, even in something like this you can roll off your shadows and reveal vulnerability but just allowing light to hit certain places in the face and eyes. In this setting, the sun isn’t working just to help illuminate our subject, it’s also bringing out colors in our background.
Now of course you don’t need to have this kind of drama in everything you do or create. You want diversity! But when thinking about lighting and creating images, start by taking everything away and building your frame one piece at a time— with the guiding question being of course “what am I trying to say, and is this decision helping me reveal something about that statement?”