Coloured gel lighting experiments
For some time, I have admired the likes of Jake Hicks who make the use of coloured gels in studio lighting both flawless and effortless. So how hard could it be? I thought. Turns out rather difficult actually. Getting the lighting in the right "plane" of the models body is the first challenge. By plane I mean that when you throw multi coloured light at a model, the lighting is likely to light one side of the model and then have either a sharp transition to a different colour from the alternate side or a blended mix. Depending on the lighting setup, this can be used to great effect. Lighting the lower body in one colour and the upper in another. The other trick with gels is that you need to consider that they behave differently to when you are using non-gelled lights. That is, to achieve a deeper colour, turning up the power of the light is likely to give you the opposite effect so you need to think in the opposite way to usual. And the problems for the photographer don't stop there. Editing is troublesome also. Modifications to luminance levels can affect the colours and not in a positive way. Black and white images with different colour casts from the gels will also have a potentially negative impact on the image. All this said, I am pleased with my experiments so far and will continue to use gels when the need arises.
