Pierre Rouger is the sort of Director of Photography that some camera assistants might think twice about working with. While Rouger unquestionably produces beautiful rich images, he prefers a very shallow depth of field, and invariably works with the aperture wide open. This often involves adding neutral densities to his filter pack, rather than stopping the lens down. Generally, Rouger is not your conventional cinematographer, although in his chosen field of music videos and television commercials, he is in high demand.

Although he tries wherever possible to use the light sources in the scene as his motivation, he doesn't feel totally bound by the practical sources in his composition. Indeed, many of the projects he photographs are totally abstract. Rouger has a fondness for darkness and contrast in his pictures, which, together with his almost contradictory love of soft lightsources, makes him a natural user of Lighttools® Soft Egg Crates®.

His approach to most setups is to use the largest softlight possible, usually using 12' x 12', 8' x 8' or 6' x 6' frames, with accompanying Soft Egg Crate® grids. Unsurprisingly, Rouger doesn't fit the Soft Egg Crates® directly to diffusion frames in the usual way, preferring instead to have them on separate frames, so that he can readily change between sizes.

What Rouger has noted, and is now using extensively in his work, is that the different angles of Soft Egg Crate® grid also differ in the amount of source wrap-around that they produce. The smaller cell sizes of the narrow angle grids, mean that less light from the distant edges of the diffuser can reach an object. Thus, only cells in the direct line from the source are lit, reducing the amount of "wrap". Rouger exploits this effect by changing between 50°, 40° and 30° Soft Egg Crates® on his diffuser frames to achieve the level of wrap he requires for each shot. He even uses his Soft Egg Crates® to give him better control from balloon-lights.

Rouger has also been using Soft Egg Crate® grids on Kino Flo Blanket-Lites gelled with high saturation colors for such music videos as Dido's Hunter and Mandy Moore's In My Pocket. What the grids have allowed him to achieve, are zones of clean, highly saturated color, which don't contaminate each other or mix down to indistinct pastel tones.

Above all else, Pierre Rouger is a careful craftsman who takes great joy from making pictures and experimenting with his art. Whatever he puts on film is carefully considered in the light that it will ultimately pass through a telecine chain and on through broadcast systems to household TV sets. He believes that there are thousands of very talented cinematographers around, and that he has been luckier than most in getting the opportunity to work with extraordinary people.