What Is an Eye Light and How Is It Rigged on a Camera?

[JT]

I've seen these twin 5 to 6 inch tubes sitting on top of a Pana and I understand they are eye lights?

Have you used one?

How are they constructed?

What wattage bulbs etc, are involved?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

You're probably seeing a small Kinoflo rigged over the mattebox as an eyelight, maybe a 2' 2-bank or a 15" Mini-Flo. You can use daylight or tungsten balanced tubes.

They are really low in amp usage, less than 3 amps.

Unless you're talking about the two tubes pointed out from the camera, which is not a light but a device to measure distance (Panatape ultrasonic ranging system.)

 

[JT]

It must be the ranging system I'm seeing. What do most eye lights look like?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Any light over the lens can be an eyelight. It's not a specific piece of equipment. It's a light to create a strong glint in the eye.

Sometimes the fill light, which also tends to be frontal, also acts like an eyelight. Other times, people will focus a little light on the eyes and flag, snoot, etc. it off of everything else so it does not fill in the shadows of the whole face. I've used a Dedolight over the mattebox with a blackwrap snoot to just create a little slash of light around the eyes. Now if that were very obvious, it goes beyond merely being an eyelight to something else -- usually I just say "a slash of light around the eyes" but some people have called it a "Kirk light" as a joke.

You see it being used on Lugosi in the original "Dracula", as well as on Morticia Addams in "The Addams Family."

I used something like that here in "Northfork" but it's more subtle than those examples:

 

[JT]

So the slash light also takes away any raccoon mask shadow effect in the eye socket area and adds the eye light! Your example seems subtle and very nice work. I couldn't see it being any more pronounced unless it was to be a stylistic effect, I'll check out those references you provided. A Dedolight seems pretty powerful, you must have brought it way down, scrims, diffusion, dimmers, etc.

Do you use dimmers? They warm the color as the intensity goes down, would you ever compensate with say a 1/4 CTB gel to bring the color temp up?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

A Dedolight is normally either a 100 or 150 watt light, hardly what you'd call "powerful". They can be bright spotted-in though. In this case, the Dedo eyelight was full-flood, with a piece of Full CTB to balance for daylight.

There are a few bigger Dedolight designs though.

Sure, I've used blue gel on a dimmed light to keep the color temp from getting too warm.

 

[JT]

I like the shot above.

:idea: I know this is a pain but I bet there would be a zillion people interested.

Could you take a few shots like those above from your work and explain or show a diagram of how you set up the lighting & camera?

A picture is worth how many words? :wink:

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm too busy these days to draw a diagram - maybe later.

In that shot, there was an 8-bank Kinoflo (Image-80) behind her head as a backlight, a very diffused Kino as a frontal fill, knocked way down, and the Dedo with the blackwrap snoot for the eyelight, right next to camera.