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Back in the days of CinemaScope, movies didn’t have shadows. Everything was lit up like noon in the Sahara desert. There were the white hats and the black hats. You could easily tell them apart in the cowboy saloons, because they probably had 10,000 watts of illumination to shoot the scenes.
A few decades later, shooting by “available light” became the thing to do. It began with The Godfather. We started seeing shadows in the corners.
Well, these days, it seems to have gone too far. If you watch TV shows like CSI (the Las Vegas variation), you know what I mean. The characters must have excellent eyesight, and I imagine the electric bill for the studio must be very low, because the rooms are very dark. I know it is a “stylistic” treatment, but when they go to a crime scene in a hotel room, and use flashlights instead of just turning on the light switch, this is just a bit too much.
In fact, the shooting by available light thing is really not the way our eyes and brain actually perceive a scene. Human vision has a lot more dynamic range than film, and certainly more than digital sensors.
OK, so shown below is a “scene” from my living room the way it would have been filmed back in the mid-1950’s. Light everywhere.
Now here is what it would look like if shot for a 2008 crime show. The only light is from the kitchen through the doorway, and is an “available light” shot.
The problem is, the above photo is not the way I saw it with my eyes from the chair where I sat with the camera. I could see more detail in the fireplace and on the wall to the sides of the kitchen door. So, I turned on a 50 watt bulb behind me and shot this third photo, shown below. It now looks the way I visualized the scene when sitting in that chair, even though the light was only that from the kitchen.
What I am saying here is that, OK, photo 1 may have been fine for the 1950’s, but there is no style to it for a 2008 crime show. Photo 2 is with available light, but, it does not show the scene the way our eyes would perceive it because we see with much more dynamic range than film or digital sensors. So, call it an available light shot from the kitchen, but add just a bit from behind so that it looks like “natural” available light. This is especially important due to our flat panel displays tending to crush the grays into black.
I am not trying to tell Hollywood how to run their business, but frankly, the programs just don’t look real anymore, because they are way too dark, and unnaturally so.