It is often said that, after thousands of years of history, there is nothing left to invent when it comes to art. Theoretically, any plastic, literary or cinematographic work -to give three examples- created today does not cease to be an amalgamation of resources and processes inherited from previous counterparts; maximum that also applies to the direction of photography.
sculpt with light
In addition to other duties, the job of a cinematographer consists of sculpt with light —and shadow— images that will later be captured in sensitive photochemical material or in the sensor of a digital camera. A technique that, before the existence of the cinematographic and photographic medium, already used the paint to bring images to life on the surface of a canvas.
This fact makes it more than recommendable —if not almost indispensable— that a PDO carefully study the work of some of the great pictorial geniuses of history, whose methods have transcended over the centuries to land in series and feature films of all kinds; being one of the most influential the Dutch Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.
To demonstrate the importance of the seventeenth-century artist we only have to focus our attention on his treatment of lighting and in what is known as “Rembrandt’s triangle”. In many of his works, the faces are illuminated from the sides, leaving the opposite side to the light source in shadow, except for a triangle located in the cheekbone area.
this resource continues to be used today by a large number of cinematographers in countless audiovisual productions regardless of their genre or tone, varying the evidence of the effect in shot mainly through the diffusion of light, the type of source, its size and the distance from the character; factors that will make the shadow more or less hard and the gradient more or less progressive.
The methodology for achieving a “Rembrandt triangle” is, in its most basic form, much simpler than it might seem. The two basic steps to achieve this are to compose the plan and place the main light in a position with an angle located approximately between 45º and 60º with respect to the subject to be illuminated. Easy, simple and for the whole family.
this is just one of the many centuries-old techniques that continue to be applied in a world dominated by the digital medium and in which technology continues to constantly evolve. Today it was time to talk about Rembrandt and his triangle, but at another time we will do it again. caravaggio and the determining role of chiaroscuro in the film medium.