Video production is an extremely efficient strategy to proliferate your viewership and increase your client base if you are running a business.
However, rendering an exuberant video is accompanied by many challenges that include factors like getting the best lighting for your video shoot.
Your eyes might perceive a scene as being okay with poor lighting, but might be wholly faded out by the camera lens.
Steps To Obtain Immaculate Lighting Conditions
The ability to select the perfect lighting conditions comes with experience and some essential tips to keep in mind. It is paramount that you prepare and plan correctly. Here are some steps to help you obtain the perfect lighting conditions that would reflect a touch of professionalism –
Prepare Ahead For The Shoot
When your goal is to create an eyecatching video, you must seek the right locations to shoot your content.
Take into account the ambient lighting through windows and the ratio of lighting and shadows. Also, be wary that the weather can be mercurial.
You also must own an adequate set of lights to avoid natural light considering its volatility.
The sunlight can hide behind the clouds, which is undoubtedly a big issue as lighting needs to be constant in a specific shot or needs to be varied according to your convenience and not the clouds.
While shooting a video, you need to be in control of the lighting at all times. Thus, planning your shoot ahead of time would only benefit you in shortlisting the perfect scenes for your content.
Choose Lighting Options and Categories
Budget Video lighting
When your production is on a budget, you don’t have to worry as there are tons of cheap clamp lights available that provide relatively decent quality.
These lights offer versatility with the option to be mounted in a variety of ways. However, they can often lack dimming control and diffusion, thus leading to hard lighting.
Lights that don’t possess filters are called hard lights. Diffusion spreads light evenly, emits soft light, with customizable features despite being on a budget.
Thus, using a diffusion material is highly recommended in case you are running on a budget.
These lights can bounce off surfaces like a wall, ceiling, or reflector to produce soft light, thereby illuminating your subject appropriately and creating a sharp image.
Mid-Range Lighting
Some of the popular mid-range studio lights can surely be everything you need to observe significant results without spending lavishly.
These studio lighting kits implement large fluorescent lights and come installed with active diffusion material.
Some kits include light stands for quick set up of lighting, as-well-as to achieve a higher total light output.
These lights come installed with a couple of switches on the back that control the number of lit bulbs, providing you greater control over your overall lighting output.
Supreme Lighting
As the price range for your video lighting kit rises, you’d be exposed to more excellent benefits and just the perfect lighting that you might have desired.
Supreme lighting features full range dimmers, wireless control, color changing capability on the fly, high diffusion, and reinforced output.
Since these lights are massive investments, you can instead rent them locally or online to ensure that these lights would work in compliance with your video and budget.
In case you are a regular video shooter, then this investment might be worth it.
It can even be a redundant investment if you are just a typical day video shooter and aren’t into using a new lens on every festival.
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Implementation of 3-point lighting
A standard yet useful configuration is the 3 point lighting that comprises a key light, a fill light, and a backlight, also commonly known as a hair light.
The key light, as the name suggests, needs to be the brightest of all three, and thus, enlightens your subject with the highest luminosity.
The key light can sometimes bring in unnecessary shadows, which are then eliminated by the fill light.
The fill light must be less intense than the key so that it is competent enough to eradicate shadows, and doesn’t flat out a perfect shot by being too closely synced in light intensity with the key.
The backlight distinguishes your subject from the background, renders depth, and prevents a flat looking shot.
You can choose your backlight to be hard light (without diffusion), as it won’t produce shadows caught on camera on the subject’s body.
The implementation of 3 point lighting is extremely efficient while shooting YouTube videos, promos, webinars, as-well-as diverse other shooting situations.
Adjusting Light Color Temperature
All lights are most certainly not equal in terms of luminosity or temperature. The filament in the bulb determines if the light would appear “cooler” or “warmer” on camera.
This notion is termed as color temperature and is measured on a scale of kelvin. A doctor’s office appears cool and fresh, thanks to fluorescent light compared to a congenial living room setting produced by warm tungsten light.
It’s advisable not to mix lights of varying color temperatures. These intertwined temperatures can cause improper color balance, leading to unnatural looking footage.
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Keep Glare at Bay
People with glasses on can often be a nightmare when it comes to lighting. Glare on glasses is very cumbersome to handle, especially for lights with bigger diffusion boxes.
One effective way to deal with this problem is by elevating your lights higher on their stands.
Keep raising and adjusting the lights and peek through the camera viewfinder until the annoying glare in the glasses disappears.
If raising the lights isn’t sufficient, move your key and fill lights farther away, at the same time keeping them relatively equal to each other.
In the 3-point lighting shooting environment, your key needs to be closer to 3:15 and your fill to 8:45.
If nothing works, you can politely ask them if they can remove their glasses. It is always a useful last resort but not always viable.
It would be best if you accommodate your shooting subject properly without compromising their comfort before requesting them to tweak their appearance to eliminate technical issues.
Final Words
Now that you have a good grasp of these critical points, you can always experiment with lighting to best suit your needs.
You can try adding or removing some lights to either filter out shadows or better illuminate the subject.
It is also advisable to add more background lights, shaping lights, adding gels, and even trying green screen measures.
