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a very different 5380K. Looking at the surroundings, there was a brown fence nearby, while sunlight was bouncing from a white wall opposite. The light reaching the meter was a mix of wavelengths reflected by everything around it – and the tint can shifts towards green or magenta as well as becoming warmer or cooler. So Ellis put the meter where it really mattered: inside the window with the real daylight illuminating the room. Direct sunlight measured around 5700K, which was reassuringly close to the original 5760K. But when the meter measured the softer ambient illumination entering the room, the result was 6780K – nowhere near the 9980K measured outside. That reading represented the combined effect of the sky and environment from the direction relevant to the shot.The artificial sky source was therefore reduced from 9980K to 6780K, and immediately things looked considerably more natural. But something was still missing. Bouncing back Looking outside again revealed another important ingredient. Sunlight wasn’t simply travelling from the sky through the window. It was hitting the garden, decking, walls and other surfaces before some of it bounced back into the room. Ellis measured the light reflected from the decking at 3410K. That warm reflected light was then recreated using a fixture at 3410K and bounced from a 6x4ft frame of white material towards the window. Suddenly, the look of the ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ shots became much closer.
Behind the scenes The nighttime set-up shows the LED fixtures, Kelvin settings and modifiers used outside the location (above); the handheld Datacolor LightColor Meter (below) was key to this process
There’s no magic number Natural illumination is messy because direct sunlight has one characteristic, open sky another. Both interact with buildings, vegetation, ground surfaces and practically everything else around a location. Measuring real light allows you to understand why it looks the way it does. Once you’ve broken a lighting condition into its component parts, you can reproduce it deliberately or start manipulating those components creatively. That’s where the Datacolor LightColor Meter becomes more than a device for checking whether an LED produces the Kelvin value printed on its display. It’s a way of reverse-engineering light. The aim is to understand what nature is doing enough that you can decide what to copy, what to exaggerate and what to ignore. Because convincing daylight isn’t necessarily 5600K. Sometimes it’s 5760K, 6780K, 3410K and 4680K – all at the same time.
Finally, Ellis measured the average temperature of daylight bouncing from the wider garden. This came in at around 4680K. A further light fixture, which was directed into a 4x4ft frame of bleached muslin, was then added at approximately that temperature. The result was a convincing recreation of daylight, despite the exterior actually being totally dark. Crucially, no single fixture was simply set to ‘daylight’.
See it in action Watch the video of Rob Ellis in action, using his Datacolor LightColor Meter to recreate daylight
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