Lighting The Way - Practical Advice For The Beginner

There is a LOT of info and always more to improve on in an ever changing field.  This is not an exhaustive breakdown of lighting gear and its use but it should be a reasonable starting explanation of differing types of gear.

Lighting. When you get more into lights you'll be overrun with all kinds of gear and it's hard to tell which is reputable and which isn't and most of all, why?  So let's start with classic gear (i.e.-Tungsten type lighting) and then we'll get to the modern (i.e.-LED's).

Yes, you can just use a shop light (you may already be doing this). Years ago it used to matter a whole lot more what lights you got because you were going to shoot on film and there wasn't any auto color correction and all that. The stock of the film would determine what color temperature you'd have to work with and having the wrong lights could jack that all up. You don't live or work in that world today (others do but it's not important to you) so you don't have to worry about that. But generally you'll want lights that are balanced to tungsten or daylight; some do both.

Mole-Richardson 1k

More appropriate is the build quality of a light so that you don't get light leaks. Light leaks are odd needles of light escaping your light fixture and lighting up your scene unintentionally. Place a light shooting away from a wall and see what light finds its way out of holes in the fixture and you'll get what I mean here. Again, this isn't a huge deal in your world, you're not that controlled in your productions yet so who cares, right? Anyway, it's a part of the high-end world

Really don't like these noisy lights.

So let's get real, those aren't good enough reasons for me to bother to try to buy a Mole Richardson light vs. something off the shelf at Home Depot or whatever. Okay, so let's talk about what your lights should not be involved in..... creating sound. Many of the cheap lights out there have built in fans and those stupid fans can be heard in the background of your audio recordings. This is simply not acceptable. So check on the noise that a light makes before picking it up.

What continuous lights do I like? I like Kino Flo and I put up with Lowel but that's probably because I've been shooting with them most of my career.  Lowel's Tungsten lights run pretty hot and have to be handled correctly or they burn up. They can even burn objects that are too close to them. I'd recommend their Rifa Lights with florescent bulbs for quick setup and cooler burning.  But I really like Kino Flo's Diva Lights. Not going to run hot like the others and produces a nice soft light that doesn't require the setting up of a soft box. But isn't all that old school?

Yeah, that is kind of all old school. There is often no dimming sliders and you can't change the colors without adding filters or swapping out bulbs (*the Diva Lite has a dimmer). You have to have significant wired power and all that.

LED Lights

LED's are a much better choice because you can run off of battery and be fine for a couple hours of shooting. This is really freeing (just think about trying to do a shoot in a moving car). So what do we need to know before picking an LED light?  

LED's flicker. That's fine and doesn't bother the human eye but when you record on video the flickering becomes obvious and clearly visible. Kind of like when you record an old TV set and you see a black band moving up the screen.  This all has to do with the refresh rate of the TV and the scanning of the chip in the camera. The point is, it sucks. So you have to search for where a vendor specifically states that the LED light is "flicker free".  Sometimes they will simply say that it is a "film light" and that may mean it's flicker free.  But if you're buying something really cheap, they probably are not flicker free unless they specifically say so.

A caveat to this is that I've used some pretty inexpensive on camera LED lights and they worked great. Just look through the comments and reviews of a given light like that. If it's working for other people it'll probably work great for you. The flickering is going to be more prominent with lights that are dimmable and that allow you to change colors because dimming requires the light to pulse tons of times (imperceptible to the human eye). By varying the timing of the pulsing a dimming effect is produced. This is the WRONG way to dim an LED. The flicker free approach requires actually varying the analogue voltage to the LED's. The challenge with that (for vendors) is that does not dim linearly. So the flicker free lights end up having a bit of tech involved to get it right. Dimming and color mixing is kind of the same challenge. So all that to say, look for flicker free.

Litepanels Micro

You'll also notice that most LED vendors are selling lights that do Daylight and Tungsten. That's basically color balanced for outside lighting and then Tungsten indoor lighting. But that's not enough in my book. I like to have LED lights that can actually produce the color wheel of colors in addition to having Daylight and Tungsten settings. The reason is because I love using colored lights in my scenes. No, I usually don't want colored light on my subjects (people), but it looks brilliant to shoot some colored lighting into my background while I light my subjects with Tungsten balanced lighting. You don't have to. It's just how I like to do it when I have the gear for it.