Lighting is the hardest thing to talk about because most of us simply ignore it; either it is light enough to shoot or it is not – and with video it almost always is light enough to get a picture of sorts.
Mostly we can’t do anything to change the available light anyway because we are videoing while trying to have a holiday and it’s hard enough keeping up with the rest of the tour group without making it more complicated.
In that most common circumstance we are more like news cameramen shooting events as they happen. Even if we are attempting a documentary type movie we will often have to make do with whatever light is available.
Even so, most of us have probably noticed that some scenes we have taken are much more attractive than others because the light happens to add a nice glow or it glances off a surface in a telling way. Then we realise that if we had perhaps tried harder to get such effects then much of a particular movie might have been improved.
The first step in improving the lighting of our shots is to recognise why the attractive scenes are attractive so that we can in turn recognise lighting opportunities when we have our cameras in our hands.
The instructional video now to be shown might be thought to be relevant more to a club story type movie filmed under controlled conditions (and we know that these don’t come around very often), but it does help to make clear why some lighting is more attractive than other.
Includes;
Types of lights - Camera mounted
Hand held
‘Tota’ type stand lights
Adjustable focusing lights
Lighting stationery subjects - Key light
Fill light
Back light
Background light
Direct light, Bounce light, Diffused light.
Actual lighting set-ups with Lowel outfit.
1 If you think you need some additional lighting you probably do. Video cameras don’t make it obvious but in general they like about the same amount of light as Kodachrome 40. If they don’t get it they simply increase the gain. Things look good in the viewfinder, but there you can’t see the deterioration in picture quality. Notice how news crews invariably add artificial lights at news conferences even in apparently well lit venues.
2 Remember the old inverse square rule; the intensity of light falls off in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. In other words small changes in the distance between a light and the subject can have big effects on the brightness. This is both good and bad. On the one hand you have to be extra careful with a moving subject and with spacious backgrounds, but it also means that you can make worthwhile changes to a lighting set-up with fairly small movement of a light or lights.
3 Setting up lights is one of the few situations in videoing where a separate light meter is still useful; for example, it tells you the relative value of main and fill lights.
4 Avoid the common give-a-ways of bad lighting;
· Shadows on the wall caused by lights not being put high enough;
· Excessive fall-off or no lighting of far backgrounds;
· Unmotivated lighting or contrary to visible room lights;
· Light and shadows which move, caused by camera mounted or hand held lights;
· Inconsistent light across a cut.
5 Use the setting options on your camera (such as “spotlight”) to override simple automatic exposure and learn from the ability of the latest cameras to record exposure data. DV tapes now record the shutter speed, the lens aperture and the amount of gain for each frame.
Keith Head, 15/11/99
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