Just some little practical and maybe for beginners non-obvious things that can make your life easier when dealing with too much or too little light.

Breaking the shutter angle rule

To have filmic look, which many people strive for, you often read that having exposure at 1/frame rate * 2, e.g. at 1/50th of a second for 25 (or 24) FPS is the thing to do. The reason for that is to have the amount of motion blur that is typical for most big-screen films and is sometimes referred to as having a shutter angle of 180 degrees.

Tip: Sometimes it’s completely OK to expose shorter than the rule says

People sometimes despair because when shooting in daylight and shooting with a wide open lense to get shallow depth of field, there’s simply too much light and if you don’t have an ND filter and ISO is already at the lowest setting, you cannot do the shot.

In those situations, the key here is the word motion. If you have very little motion in the shot (e.g. a close-up of a person sitting/standing somewhere), you won’t really see a big difference if you expose at 1/100 or even 1/200. Just try it and develop a feeling for how far you can go in certain situations.

Tip: Sometimes it’s completely OK to expose longer than the rule says

This is quite the opposite but the principle is the same: If there is not much motion in the shot you can play around with longer exposure (e.g. 1/20th) and that way get an extra stop of light when you need it, if your camera allows that. Imagine a close-up in a mexican stand-off at a gloomy bar. That stop can really help and won’t make your shot less cinematic.

Tip: Use a denoiser to be able to use higher ISO settings

After getting to know your camera you develop a feeling for how high you can set your ISO for a still acceptable image (and don’t just trust reviews by anyone containing numbers because this is highly subjective). If you use a denoiser, e.g. like the one integrated in Kyno (disclaimer: as one of the makers of Kyno I am biased), you can drive that up a bit, because up to a certain level denoisers can remove certain types of ISO noise quite well. Many cameras allow in-camera denoising which is sometimes crappy, so a software denoiser typically gives better results but that depends on a lot of factors. It’s just a good thing to have in mind when planning locations and light, to sometimes have a way to squeeze one or two extra stops of light out of your low-budget equipment in post without much hassle.