Election Night Light

After yesterday’s general election in the UK I doubt I was the only person last night watching the Election Night coverage on television – from 10pm it was hard to avoid it, with blanket coverage across BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News (and even RTE TV and radio covered it through the night).  As I watched I found myself thinking not about who won what seats, or who would be the next prime minister, but – a little more relevant to this blog – about how the different studios (and the presenters and guests in them) were being lit.  And I couldn’t help thinking I had inspired the BBC in this respect.  Unlikely, but let me explain.

Before I do that: a disclosure.  The photograph above is a composite of two images.  Both were taken within a minute of each other, and the subject matter in the photograph is a realistic representation of what was in front of the camera.  But when I took the wide angle shot of the TV cabinet with the remote control in the front, the image on the TV screen didn’t expose well, with blown highlights in blues and pinks that I found a little off-putting (as you can see if you click on the thumbnail on the right).  So I took a tighter shot of the TV screen itself (which I wanted anyway for this blog post), resized and skewed it quickly to match the orientation of the TV in the wider shot, positioned it over the screen in the original image, and added a radius 4 Gaussian Blur to take match the depth of field of the shot it was being dropped in to.  That gave me the image you see up top.

And one other thing that’s interesting to note about that photo up top is that the exposure is identical to that used for the photo of the bookshelf in my last post, and that makes sense.  Both were taken in the same room, but with no daylight in the room (this shot at night, the previous one in the morning but with the curtains closed) and so both are lit by the same spotlights in the ceiling, which give consistent levels of light – f/2.8 @ 1/25s, ISO 1600 it seems.

The reason I had a tighter crop of the TV screen to drop into the wider shot was that I wanted to use it to look briefly at the studio lighting that the BBC were using for their (impressive) set.  So first a wide angle look (courtesy of the BBC and photographed through my TV) of the set:

Pretty vast, and while the colours don’t replicate with 100% accuracy, they are close enough and you can see that cooler blue and purple tones are dominant background colours.  While this shot doesn’t show it, the presenters and guests are, as you would expect, lit with a much warmer skin-tone-friendly light.

That use of contrasting colours for the background and subjects is quite common in TV because it is aesthetically pleasing, and it was apparent on other stations last night also. Lighting a studio as vast as this must be very technically challenging, and I’ve no doubt the BBC have the best in the business assigned to a task like this.

While I’m not in any way familiar with that sort of a job, or many of the technical issues that are sure to arise, I imagine there are some parallels with lighting a background and a subject for a photograph, and with my photographer’s cap on, I made some observations about the set and how it is lit as I watched.

Firstly I would speculate that large parts of the set are not actually being lit at all.  Apart from the white circular walkway, the floor itself is not directly lit, but is a black glossy surface that does pick up light from all around the set, but is not likely to throw much of it back (efficiently at least) on anything or anyone positioned on it. The white circular walkway obviously is lit, and I think it is lit from beneath, probably by strip lights running along its length, with a semi-opaque material used for the surface which diffuses the light from beneath in a nice even way.

The area behind the main set with all the work stations is also only lit where absolutely necessary – the back wall is an important element in the design and is lit accordingly, but the remainder of that space appears to be picking up light from the rest of the set, or from the screens positioned throughout. At the top of the set you can see the a whole assortment of stage lights hanging from the ceiling and I suspect some of these serve very specific purposes depending on how the set is being used and what shot is required.  Others probably just add accent lights to different parts of the set, or are used to give, what in photographic terms, you might call a base exposure – a minimum level of (soft) light that is lifted where needed by other harder light sources.

For instance take a look at a shot which has a few people around a desk:

Here you can hopefully see that, even with the dark suits, there are no areas of dramatic shadow, and the lighting used for the people here definitely appears to me to follow the concept of a nice soft fill a stop or so below the required exposure, with hard light sources used as a key light for each subject.  That scheme avoids any area of deep shadow, and is also forgiving in terms of subject movement and different camera angles.

This final shot of one of the presenters gives a better indication of this type of lighting.  The shadow under his chin, and of his glasses across his face, suggests a fairly hard light source (if it was soft those shadows wouldn’t have such defined edges), but the fact that we can still make out a lot of detail in those shadows is due to the ambient fill light which is soft, while the exposure of his white shirt in that shadow area suggests that the ambient light is underexposed.

Notice also again that contrast between the pink background and the warmer light on his face (probably gelled, or at least balanced with the camera’s white balance).   I mentioned at the outset I thought I may have inspired it… well you have to admit the colour scheme does look a little bit familiar.  Maybe someone at the BBC reads my blog!

I started with a disclosure, and I should finish with this disclaimer.  All this “analysis” is pure speculation from someone not at all skilled in set design or lighting, and I could be a million miles out in my thinking, or at the very least have got at least some of it wrong.  If you know more about this stuff than I do, or have your own thoughts, I’d be interested to hear them in the comments.  And even if I am very very wrong, it was interesting to attempt to reverse-engineer the lighting in this way – I often do it for photographs I look at, but it can be attempted for television and films too.  Radio? Not so much!