Check out āBarry Lyndonā, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).
More recently, some scenes in āWolf Hallā were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, itās very atmospheric: thereās one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.
As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: āYou always need enough light to see how dark it is.ā
A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of āGame of Thronesā, most infamously in the complaint-heavy āBattle of Winterfellā episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because āa lot of people donāt know how to tune their TVs properlyā.
So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and itās not in the TV.
We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and itās 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.
Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.
We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and itās more than youād think, once thereās a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.
You get more light than youād expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduaneā says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sureā¦
For another thing lamps can have accessories. Hereās an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. Iāve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.
Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though itās less bright as a result:
This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.
And then thereās this, which a lot of people saw and didnāt recognise, because itās often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.
There IS a beverage, thatās in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.
Hereās one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.
And hereās the effect it produces.
Hereās a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.
Finally, hereās something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. Itās not perfectly spherical so didnāt create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since Iād locked the camera so its automatic settings didnāt change to match light levels.
This is the effect with candles placed ānormallyā.
But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.
Ā It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.
Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didnāt last long, needed constant adjustment, didnāt give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and thatās what mattered most.
Theyāre often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.
Hereās Jason Kingsley making one.
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