Bright, diffused, and largely shadow less light is the best method of lighting for about 85% of all video production applications.

Luckily, this is also the easiest lighting effect to achieve.  One light pointed toward the ceiling might be enough.

Bright, diffused light is what you find in the vast majority of offices, schools, stores and homes.   So it looks perfectly natural and translates well onto video tape.

Diffused light means the light is everywhere.  Remember the two basic types of light:

Diffused

Directional

Directional light means an uninhibited beam of light is pointing straight at something.  The light is harsh, creating deep shadows.   Picture a cloudless day.

Diffused light is the opposite.  Diffused light is bouncing everywhere.  It’s soft, and creates almost no shadows.  What shadows exist have soft, fuzzy edges.   Picture a day that’s totally overcast with clouds.

Supplemental lighting for video is almost exclusively tungsten-halogen, which by itself is very harsh.  Lamps (bulbs) made for photographic light fixtures are never coated with white paint to create diffusion in the same way standard incandescent light bulbs sold for home use are.  So if you want diffused light in your video production, you must take one of these measures:

Bouncing the light
Diffusions gels
Umbrellas
Soft Boxes

Bouncing the light is simple.  It requires no tools.  Just point your light at the ceiling or wall.  Ceiling’s too high and the walls are painted black?  Bounce the light against a white poster board you buy for a buck.  (Keep the poster board at least two feet from your fixture or fire is a real danger.)

Most ceilings are white, which is the perfect color to bounce off.  Light being bounced off the ceiling fills the entire room with bright illumination and looks perfectly natural on camera.

Even bouncing one light will make a small or medium sized room bright enough to capture beautiful video.

If you want to progress beyond bouncing, the tools you need for diffusing your lights are simple and fairly inexpensive.

Diffusion gels are much like color gels and they are clipped onto the front of your light.  The come in different densities.  Most density gels don’t provide enough diffusion in my opinion and they’re worthless.

Umbrellas can be attached to the light fixture easily, then removed and folded for easy storage.  Umbrellas work by giving the light a bright surface to bounce off that’s only about one foot away.   Some umbrellas are silver, more expensive ones are white on the inside and black on the outside.  Umbrellas produce beautiful, wide spread diffused light.  One light on an umbrella might be plenty if your shooting area is small.

Soft boxes are a step above umbrellas, but they are really only practical for face shots because the beam of light they put out is quite small.  This is because soft boxes not only diffuse the light, they make it directional.

What?  Isn’t that a contradiction?  Diffused light by its very nature is not directional.
Soft boxes are made of heavy-duty flame resistant cloth.  They come with a flexible metallic frame that you stretch the cloth over and then fit over the light.  The inside of the soft box if very reflective.  The outside is black.  The front of the box is heavy diffusion cloth.  The black sides of the box shape the diffused light coming out the front into a directional beam that looks positively magnificent on a face.  Soft boxes are by far the prettiest diffused light method for face shots.

One word of caution about diffusing your lights.  Whenever you diffuse a light source, you decrease its intensity.  A soft box is not feasible with anything less than a 500 watt lamp because the intensive diffusion knocks the light’s intensity down so far.    I always use a 1000 watt lamp with a soft box.

Bouncing the light off the ceiling doesn’t knock the intensity down very far at all and the resulting diffusion you get is well worth this slight decrease in intensity.

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