Ryan Joseph

Art Photography Film. IG: @RyanJosephDP

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

Negative space is your friend.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

We used a soft blue moonlight from the left side on the women on the bed, and then a warm overhead orange almost like a chandelier hitting WesGhost on the right as we dolly left to reveal him. One of my favorite opening shots I’ve done for a music video.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

My Leko got stolen so we had to use a Fresnel instead.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

When you're going for a big wrap you want the light to feel natural, so we had a softbox up front and a 6x6 diffusion from the side and just kept everything really subtle so you're seeing shapes without really feeling the sources.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

Aperture 80C with a Fresnel sitting behind the wall, tungsten dialed in warm, and every time he moved his head his glasses would catch the light and beam it back toward the lens which just kept becoming a natural part of the shot.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

We had a flickering red and white overhead, a blood orange hard source pushing through the left window like a dying sun, and blue on the other side so the bridge felt like it had real light sources that existed within the world of the film.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

It didn’t work.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

We used a 1x2 litemat panel to make this shot. I love how the falloff came out and the shape of the table helps guide our eyes.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

In defense of top lighting.
People will tell you that you need to light the eyes, but top lighting gives you natural contrast in small spaces and it almost always looks good if you're okay with losing a little bit of the face.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

One Light Fixed It
We had the red light and the key light doing their thing but something still felt like it was missing, so I threw a spotlight straight down the middle and that was all it needed.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

Those lights running down the back wall came with the set and were already doing exactly what I needed, so I just let them work and built around them.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

Overhead frosted glass light, one Nova bounced into the ceiling for a little blue in the room, and then just letting the windows blow out naturally because sometimes you really don't need much to make something look good.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

The sun kept going behind clouds right when we were ready to go, and at a certain point you just can't keep waiting because you only have so many hours, so we supplemented the backlight and pushed soft light through diffusion up front to make it work anyway.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

I wanted the audience's eyes to fully adjust to the dark before anything shifted so that when the lights finally came up it actually registered, so we kept the entire first half of the movie under 50% on the histogram.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

I clamped an 80c to the rafters and shot through a diffusion square that was already built into the set, and that's where almost all of this is coming from. Really liked how it turned out.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

They asked if we could put a human in a cucumber suit, I said yes then immediately called my SPFX artist, Vaida to save the day. We ended up doing the whole thing practically with a green morph suit and real chopped cucumbers placed by hand.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

We soaked the floor in water and flour so he could roll around and get dirty, which looked great, but I genuinely could not believe how long it took to clean that studio up afterward.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

This whole background is actually a white psych wall and we lit the whole thing with one unit on a menace arm, skirted down tight so you get that hard line at the bottom.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

I turned the practical lights almost all the way down, bounced a 600D off the ceiling, and put him in silhouette so everything you're seeing is just ambient bounce coming back down. Sometimes you just need to take a simple approach to make something look good.

[Ryan Joseph @RyanJosephDP]

Lets talk about framing and how it guides the eye.