Moving Mountains Lifestyle Shot Breakdown

Another kitchen lighting breakdown, here we go.

The way I lit this shot was a little different than the food shot as it needed to accommodate a large space and several full size humans rather than a tiny burger. Luckily we started with this shot so I could ‘set the look’ with the more difficult wide.

First thing is always to look for anything I can’t control. Firstly, the studio was flanked by large windows, meaning I either black them out or be at the mercy of the weather. Secondly, due to the specifics of this shoot and studio, we couldn’t hire kit (COVID stuff) so I was limited to what I owned and the in-house kit at @theventuragency so I knew I needed help from the big HMI in the sky.

We wanted a high key commercial look so I knew I couldn’t rely on the sun alone. First job was to get the aputure 300d with light dome mini on a C stand in a menace atm style, this was my ‘sun buffer’, if the sun disappeared behind the clouds, this light picked up the slack and gave me a strong edge to work with.

Next I set up 2 2x6 poly boards next to each other to get a 4x12 reflective surface, I then bounced my remaining fresnel fixtures into this to wrap the ‘sun’ around and give that lovely soft wrappy look to Luke. This worked later as I swing it around to key the 2 women sat at the breakfast bar.

I felt that the right hand side of frame needed some love and wanted to give Luke a little rim light so I used the Kino Flo 4 bank, one of my favourite uses for these is to turn them all the way up, then all the way down until you can’t see it’s effect anymore and then JUST up from there. This gives a tiny tiny kiss of light which makes a world of difference for me, but doesn’t feel like a source.

Finally I thought our hero burger needed a bit of juice, especially as we were cutting in to the hero shot of it later. I used an aputure MC, hidden behind the salad bowl, just to highlight it a little, making it stand out and keeping the whole spot more consistent.

So, there we go. Any questions, fire away on Instagram, otherwise let me know how you like this format and breakdown.

Thanks to:

Director: Kaine Levy
Prod: The Ventur Agency

Shot -> Breakdown -> BTS