Production Lighting

Shooting dark interiors and making them look like daytime is a challenge that presents itself often to the professional lighting technician. There are times in studio or on location where you must be able to replicate a bright sunny daylight coming in through a window.

The challenge is not with how light feels as it comes from the outside, but how you can brighten an interior in a believable way. The use of powerful daylight units, and ambient and directional light help immensely in you endeavor to make a dark set look like a warm afternoon. This is a technique that is used in short films, commercials, features, and television.

Light placement is a critical factor in showcasing products up close for product photography and commercial videos. Where will the key vs. fill lights be placed? How will that placement impact the drawing of shadows and highlights on the product? Do you need to light a white background versus a creative setting?

In addition, you need to consider what type of lights work best for studio lighting and product shots. Continuous lights and/or strobe lights can be utilized for studio lighting. Continuous lights, or “hot lights”, that are either on or off are a go-to solution for those just beginning product photography. While they bathe a studio with even, constant light, they do not put out very much of it. On the other hand, strobe light, that are capable of releasing instantaneous bursts of light, is more powerful than continuous lights, but over only a fraction of a second.

This is the area of product photography where experience counts, so for those without experience to draw from, trial and error – and patience – is required to determine best results from different light placements.

Lighting a green screen is fairly simple from a technical perspective. Unlike traditional film lighting techniques, lighting a green screen is all about evenness and consistency. Any area of the backdrop that appears in the frame must be lit perfectly even and exposed correctly. If your backdrop is lit properly on one side but underexposed on the other, your compositor or editor will have a harder time pulling a clean key. The key is to achieve soft light from all sides. No matter what creative look you’re aiming for, the green screen will always need to be lit the exact same way from all sides. On bigger productions, you may need to use overhead lighting, additional sources, or more diffusion, but the basic principles outlined here will apply no matter what.

How do you configure lighting for a car’s interior for either day or night scenes? The challenge of these set-ups is that you need to both pick-up the levels inside the car as well as eliminate exterior light (often a bright sky) that reflects in the wind shield. For larger productions, a process trailer is used to tow the picture car behind a camera truck with an onboard generator to power the lights. This gives a production more flexibility to rig lighting equipment around the car. For smaller budgeted productions, there are less expensive alternatives to light this set up. Here are our recommended lighting products to consider for moving car scenes.

Night exteriors pose unique lighting challenges to cinematographers. Not only do they have to paint light on the blank canvas that is darkness but they also have to mimic the look and feel of the moon, a light source that is often not powerful enough to produce a decent exposure. Typically, nighttime exteriors also require a significant number of powerful lights (and generators) to illuminate your scene, which naturally poses a problem if your budget is limited. So, how do you recreate moonlight for its purpose in your shot? How do you leverage available lights to your advantage without breaking the bank?