12 March 2026

Lighting for mixed stills and motion

How we plot a day that has to yield both a hero still and usable coverage without relighting every setup.

A day that must produce a campaign still and a film rarely fails on cameras. It fails on light that cannot travel from a locked hero frame into coverage.

We start with the still: key, fill, and edge that will also read at 24 or 25 fps. If a beauty dish is too small for a moving subject, we change the modifier before we change the shot list.

The stills art director and the DP share a plot, not two plots taped to the same wall. Gels, diffusion, and practicals are decided in pre-production with both names on the PDF.

On the day, tethered stills are the rehearsal for motion. If the still is wrong, the film will not rescue it. If the still is right, coverage is a question of blocking, not of reinventing the key.

When a client needs a hard beauty frame that will never move, we protect a short window for that modifier and then rebuild for motion. Honesty about time is cheaper than a relight that eats lunch.

Dgti produces commercial photography and motion from Lublin. Stills and film share one plot so a campaign does not arrive as two vendors, and a lookbook does not argue with a cut in public. The rooms on Krakowskie Przedmieście hold tabletop, a compact cyclorama, and a colour desk. Clients review tethered stills and a calibrated picture in one visit. Product and grade are not two appointments. Location days stay on the plaster we recce. Bounce and a quiet key match the lane; we do not gel a postcard onto a grey street. If the weather turns we wait or we rewrite the shot. Agencies come with a media plan. We name masters for print, 1:1 and 9:16, keep a working project for the revision window, and hand an archive another team can open a year later.

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