There are literally hundreds of lighting styles and types of lighting equipment that you can use when shooting video with your Nikon HDSLR. Some of the gear you use for still photography may even work well in lighting your scenes for video.
Reflectors, LED light panels (including small ones that can be placed on the camera’s accessory shoe or hot shoe), Tungsten or other types of constant light units and their modifiers (umbrellas, barn doors, diffusers, gels) are all useful lighting gear that you can utilize to light your subjects and entire scenes in your video shoots.
Three-Point Lighting
One of the basic video lighting techniques that works well for still or video is three-point lighting, which is comprised of a main light, fill-light and accent light. The main light is where most of the illumination on your subject comes from. The fill light, which is set at half the power of the main light, fills in the shadows so they’re not so harsh. Lastly, the accent light, which is sometimes called a hair light (when lighting people), is used to kick in a little bit of accent lighting on the subject. In our video, we’ve gelled the accent light to add a more interesting look to the subject.
This is helpful for studio-quality lighting. I like the effect of the blue gel on the accent light for that moody look.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good basic video of studio lighting. Although, I already know basic studio lighting, it was a great review on what I learned during undergrad.
ReplyDeleteThree Point lighting is in the eye of the beholder. What you see isn't what you get all the time... Of course if you have no budget, "it is, what it is..."
ReplyDeleteThree Point lighting is in the eye of the beholder. What you see isn't what you get all the time... Of course if you have no budget, "it is, what it is..."
ReplyDeleteI've worked with different lighting techniques before, but I like how he broke it down and even gave tips on how to set various moods. The blue gel effect was definitely cool and I've actually seen this trick done in photography...cool!
ReplyDelete