Design Good example of how light affects subject

[ruinexplorer]

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Want to see how much of an effect the direction and color of your lighting has on your portrait subject’s face? Check out this trippy video by Nacho Guzman, who used a moving light and changing colors to cause a woman’s face to look like it’s constantly morphing.

The 2-minute-long clip is a teaser for an upcoming music video of the song “Sparkles and Wine” by French electronic music group Opale.

It was shot using a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR and two lenses (a Canon 24-105mm f/4 and a Samyang 35mm f/1.4). The lighting consisted of two 10×10 centimeter LED lights that were fixed to a ring and rotated around the woman’s face, as well as a string of Christmas light-style LEDs.

It’s a very low budget effort that illustrates how different lighting angles produce vastly different results:


Read more at Trippy Video Shows How a Person's Face Changes Depending on the Lighting

Guzman says the video is a homage to French film director Henri-Georges Clouzot, who used the same effect in his unfinished film L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno”). In it, the rotating lights were used to create a creepy, psychedelic scene showing the mental state of a jealous husband.

For our purposes, it may be of interest to look at individual frames of the video to compare how the various colors affect her skin color as well as the different angles change the perspective of her facial expressions.

 

[cbrandt]

That is a really excellent video. I'm fascinated by how much effect it has on how her mouth appears.

 

[TheaterEd]

Very cool. Definitely showing this to my students.

 

[derekleffew]

I love how the nose shadow travels clockwise around her face.

I've been searching the Internet for demonstration of different frontlight, sidelight, downlight, and backlight series of photos that appear, with varying results, in every stage lighting textbook. This video is close to optimal, even if it is only frontlight with varying angle of elevation s.
.

 

[kicknargel]

I was transfixed by the way her teeth seem to move up and down between her lips.