Lighting is one of the most important elements that will either make, or break, the quality of your video production.
Bad lighting marks you as a video amateur in a nano-second!
Improve your lighting techniques to greatly improve the overall quality of your video productions. This post will explain the basics of lighting for video.
Quality lighting does not have to be hard, nor does it take fancy, expensive equipment, although fancy equipment is nice. 🙂
To get the most out of whatever lighting situation you find yourself in, you need to know the basics of video lighting. Once you know the basics, you can make any situation you find yourself in work.
LIGHTING BASICS
One of the most basic things to learn about lighting is the characteristics of diffused and direct lighting. (Also known as hard and soft light.) Direct light is what you have on a bright, sunny day. Diffused light is what you get on a completely cloudy day. The clouds diffuse the light of the sun.
This video below explains more about the differences between diffused and direct light.
Using Natural Light Helps Make Lighting Easy
As a videographer, I found myself working in every situation you can imagine, from the bottom of a cave to inside opulent office buildings. No matter where I was, I needed to create a professional quality video image, and that takes knowing good lighting techniques and how to take advantage of whatever natural light you have. Natural light can be a great time saver for low-budget or student films. Learning to use natural lights means taking advantage of windows or other available light from lamps. There are a lot of tricks for doing that right.
The demonstration in the video tutorial below uses windows and ordinary household lighting fixtures.
The keys to high quality lighting lie in placement and diffusion level. With both proper placement and diffusion, you can achieve quality lighting. In the video tutorial below, you can see how I set up professional quality 3-point lighting for a talking head using windows and standard home fixtures.
LIGHTING MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE CAMERA
There is no doubt about it, even if you have the world’s greatest video camera, if your lighting is awful, your image will suffer.
REMEMBER: A cheap camera backed up with good lighting techniques will get you a better shot than a great camera with crummy lighting.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT QUESTIONS
- Describe the differences between diffused and direct light.
- Name a situation where you would direct light. Then name a situation where diffused would be better.
- What happens to sunlight on a cloudy, overcast day?
More Information on Video Lighting Techniques
Simple 3-Point Lighting for a Talking Head Video
Using Compact Florescent Lights in Video
ur teaching is great,i need to know more about setting of light and camera
Hi Enabu
Thanks for your comment I am glad you enjoy my video tutorials! To lean more, explore the blog! I have over 400 articles and tutorials on this blog covering all subjects of video making. Enjoy!
Lorraine
As a professional video production company, we always carefully light our scenes. The best part is the way one can paint the scene with light to subtly emphasize subjects, shade them and differentiate the most important visual parts of the shot with a really artful effect. It’s one of those things that can easily go unnoticed by viewers but makes the difference between a great -looking scene and a visually flat and uninspiring composition. Hurray for the art of lighting!
Hi Corey.
Hurray for the art of lighting indeed! Thanks so much for your comment. Lighting is truly an art form and probably the single best way to have great-looking shots. Doing it to the extent you do makes beautiful images. Of course it is also quite time consuming and not something small low-budget productions can do to perfection. Here on this blog, my readers are mostly beginner to intermediate so my tutorials cover the basics of lighting so people can make whatever situation/equipment they have work as well as possible. Whenever I watch TV, I love carefully studying the image and then imagining the lighting set-up. All that work I didn’t have to do as I sprawl out on my easy chair in the evenings! Life is good. 🙂
Thanks and have a great day!
Lorraine