Diffused lighting interior design

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Diffusion does have limitations in bright sunlight since it changes the character of the light. This doesn’t matter if you’re shooting only close shots, but your close shots won’t match your long shots. When I need both kinds of setups, I prefer screening, which reduces light intensity without changing its quality too much.

Finally, translucent white umbrellas can turn a soft umbrella setup into an ultra-soft box. Simply install the white brolly in place of the silver or gold one, reverse the unit and aim the umbrella at the subject so that the light shoots through it.

The farther from the light source, the greater the diffusion. You can hang diffusers on the light itself, on its barndoors or on a Century stand between the light and the subject. For a really diffuse effect, you can bounce the light off a reflector.

White sheeting is useful for tenting, a special form of ultra-diffusion. Once, I even covered a picture window with a pale yellow sheet, softening the sunshine streaming in and changing the color temperature from daylight to (roughly) tungsten.

Surely in some project you have noticed walls or ceilings that seem to be illuminated by invisible mechanisms. This is backlighting.

Spots and broads have side barn doors that are ideal for holding spun glass, but plastic doesn’t work quite so well. Spread the diffusion across the already-positioned barn doors and clip it on with wooden clothes pins. The extra distance from the lamp makes the diffusion more effective, and the media will stay safely cool indefinitely.

Even knowing these things, a conscientious gaffer will re-check the diffusion every few minutes to make sure it’s not overheating. Unless the light is inaccessible, I prefer to avoid using diffusion in circular light filters. Even spun glass and the best heat-resistant gels will eventually brown and char like forgotten pot roasts.

Finally, this indirect lighting can be found in furniture: cupboards, sideboards, and shelves. It offers us an additional source of light without resorting to lamps or direct light objects and highlights the design of the piece in which it is incorporated.

On the other hand, the light is more uniform, does not produce flashes and is of higher quality than conventional bulbs, so our eyesight will suffer less.

Finally, diffusion reduces undesirable patterns, such as lamp filaments, the lamps themselves and the lenses in front of them. These often place noticeable shadows right in the middle of the light beam, where it’s most visible to the camera. Diffusion usually solves this problem.

For product shots and special portraits, there’s nothing like a cloth tent. Simply string a clothes line and hang a sheet to create a side and a roof. Lighting through the sheet creates an essentially shadowless design.

Spotlights (and some scoops and broads) have filter holders that accept a metal sandwich frame holding spun glass or gel cut to size. This setup is good for lights too high or otherwise too difficult to reach easily. Scoops are generally safe, but broads and spots should be checked periodically to make sure the media isn’t charring. Focusing spot lamps in the “flood” position can reduce the heat a little.

Broads are floodlights, just big enough to hold a long halogen lamp, a half-cylinder reflector behind it and a barn door on each side. Because of their small size, broads throw obvious shadows and their beams can be unpleasantly mottled. The workhorses of location lighting, broads can be much improved by judicious diffusion.

In addition to softening, diffusion widens the pattern of the light beam and reduces light intensity. The broader beam lets you light a larger area per instrument, but the lower light level means you may need more units to achieve a given light level, so that’s often a wash. The key point here is that diffusion will always reduce the light intensity on a subject.

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Placed in front of a light source, diffusion discombobulates the directional light rays that pass through it, scattering them widely. The resulting beam appears softer and more general, with shadows lessened or even completely absent. This softer light has several advantages. It looks more natural and more like daylight or uniform overhead office lighting. It flatters subjects by diplomatically suppressing pits, crags, wrinkles and other facial blemishes. It reduces uncomfortable glare in a subject’s eyes. By minimizing shadows, it can conceal the fact that a subject is lit movie-style, by two or more instruments. (Nothing gives the game away like a matched pair of key and fill light shadows behind a subject.)

This technique is quite common to find in cavities in ceiling, creating a false ceiling to hide the lighting system. In this case, the light goes downwards and gives us the sensation of higher spaces. If you choose to incorporate it into mouldings, the light goes in the opposite direction, from bottom to top, and is perfect for delimiting one room and separating it from another.

LED lights can change colour and intensity so that your space is no longer static and can change according to your needs at any given moment.

Also, in bright, filtered sunlight, the camcorder’s aperture will be small enough to deliver good depth of field, which is essential for shooting very small objects especially.

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Light-diffusing material (just plain diffusion in professional jargon) softens directional light by scattering it. In the short version, that’s all there is to tell, but selecting, mounting and fine-tuning diffusion is one of the gaffer’s subtler arts. The rest of this column is the long version. We’ll see how to determine the lighting look you want, match diffusion media to the lights you’re using and deploy all this stuff to good effect.

Spotlights are small light sources throwing hard-edged, directional beams. Although you can often move the lamp back in the instrument (closer to the reflector) to soften the light a bit, this approach makes the barn doors less effective. You will probably spend much of your light-diffusing efforts on spotlights.

Why not use self-diffusing soft boxes instead and dispense with diffusion entirely? The answer is control. You can never make a soft light any harder, but you can soften a spotlight progressively until you get exactly the diffusion you want. And when you’re traveling light (or cheap) a unit that works both hard and soft can do the jobs of two instruments.

You can light human subjects through sheets hemmed and mounted on PVC pipe frames. An assistant can hold a framed diffusion sheet between sun and subject, even for setups as wide as a medium shot.

When an interior designer publishes a photo of their latest work, we love to look at the details that “build” environments and that can completely change the essence of the space. If you are one of us, you will surely want to know what backlighting is.

Light diffusion

Before we look at diffusion setups, we need to emphasize safety precautions that really ought to be obvious. Excepting fluorescents, all lights grow hot enough to char filter media, burn fingers and start fires. Before deploying any diffusion material, you need to understand:

What is transmitted lighting

Scoops are large, open, circular floods often used in studios. Because they throw soft but distinct shadows, they’re usually fitted with big rings holding diffusion material.

Backlighting in interiors is an innovative way, not only to provide light, but also to create atmospheres and give a different touch to the space.

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DiffusedlightCeiling

For a really soft effect, try clamping spun glass or plastic with a C-stand placed several feet in front of the spotlight. Of course, if you go too far out, the cone of the light beam will be wider than the diffusion, but sometimes that’s just what you want. For example, you can soften the light on just the face with a circle of spun glass stapled to a thin wire frame.

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Fluorescent banks are already quite soft and they can be ultra-creamy when covered with spun glass. One of the best materials is the milk plastic panels sold for fluorescent ceiling lights. These can add significant weight, however.

This indirect lighting is very discreet due to its small size and best of all, it does not produce heat so none of the furniture or surfaces with which it is in contact will be damaged.

What will you diffuse these instruments with? As always: it depends. Milky plastic filter material creates a very soft effect, but make absolutely sure you get the strongly fire-resistant plastic specifically intended for movie and theatrical lighting. If you’ll be supporting the diffusion on separate C-stands you can (carefully) use standard milk plastic 2×4 fluorescent light panels.

Now that you know everything that backlighting or indirect light brings to spaces, you will surely see the interior designs of designers with different eyes, won’t you?

Spun glass is a pure-white cousin of pink insulation batting (with the same nasty habit of leaving fiberglass stickers in your hands). Supplied in large, thin, flexible sheets, it is perhaps the most versatile diffusion because you can cut it to any size, double or triple it in thickness and place it wherever you want. Like plastic filters, you can buy spun glass from theatrical supply houses. Or you can get furnace air filters at your local hardware store. One caution: the glass material will not easily burn, but it will melt.

Today we are talking about indirect light, also known as backlighting in interior design. A technique that is here to stay thanks to the development and innovation that LED technology is experiencing.

You can often omit diffusion in wider shots, where higher contrast is not as big a problem. Unlike flexible reflectors, diffusion screens work fine on somewhat windy days because the light travels through them, rather than bounces off them. Do make your assistant aware, however, that a 4×4-foot diffusion screen is a very efficient sail in a brisk wind.

In all cases, we gain a decorative resource that provides spaciousness to the space while fulfilling its primary function of illuminating. But backlighting provides us with much more.

Small tents work well in a studio, but large ones do better outside where the sun is your light source. (Of course clouds make fabulous diffusers, but they are notoriously hard to control.) Bed sheets and black gardening shade cloth are good options. Orient the clothes line and sheet so that the sun filters through both the top and the side. The results will amaze you.

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Backlighting is based on LED lighting that, when reflected on surfaces such as the wall, floor, or ceiling, makes our perception see a continuous illumination, without reflections, glare, or shadows.

The larger a light source, the more diffuse it is. Bouncing a spotlight beam off a 4×4-foot white foamcore reflector creates a very soft illumination. A bed sheet is even bigger and softer, but the dramatic light falloff means that this solution isn’t very flexible.

As noted, soft boxes are already completely diffused and umbrellas can’t usually be softened, but every other common type of lighting instrument can benefit from the soothing influence of diffusion material.

Incidentally, outdoor tents are also useful for copying photos onto videotape. Even glossy prints behave themselves in the tent’s shadowless environment.

As LEDs are more efficient, backlighting is a more effective way of providing light to rooms. So, we will have more light with less consumption.