Lighting Advice I Wish I Knew Sooner

there are so many lighting techniques that I use all the time now but took me a long time to learn hopefully I can help you guys pick them up a little earlier in your career than I did and we're going to be using the nanlite forza 5002 for this video which it's not only one of my favorite lights but definitely one of the best Lights released in 2023 sponsoring this video Let's see what it can do the way we're going to do this is I've got a Canon C70 and a monitor over here so I can keep an eye on what's going on and Alla is going to be modeling for us so you're going to take a seat right here and we'll just kind of be going through a few different lighting setups different modifiers but first we've got to control the light in here there are big windows in our studio so Step One is I got to close them [Music] all first thing before we worry about settings or lighting modifiers is just the placement of the light in the room a big thing is moving your subject away from the wall so right now Ella is sitting I don't know like two or three feet away and the light on her is kind of a similar brightness to what's happening in the background also the depth of the field is about the same right both are more or less in Focus so we can make a big difference if we take your stool let's move it forward and now all of a sudden we have a big difference in the ratios the subject is about one or two stops brighter than the background and you have this clear separation you know what to focus on both the depth of field is focused and your lighting is emphasizing that this is something I see a lot of the time when people set their YouTube videos they're just sitting against the wall and you don't get this sense of Separation so adding this depth makes a huge Improvement to any [Music] setup this one I've covered before when I talked about the difference between YouTube videos and cinematic videos like you know narrative or commercial so the setup right now I've adjusted things a bit I added a bounce card so there's a little bit more fill and everything on our subject is looking very kind of neutral like there's no Deep Shadows just under her chin a little bit but more or less everything is light and bright and you can see what's going on this is what i' think of as more of either a like interview setup or a beauty setup you can see everything it's all well lit now the biggest difference between this and a movie is really like kind of the placement of the lights so I'm going to move them way over to the side and it really made my life harder today by not using a softbox cuz now I have to move two stands every time but if you've got a soft box at home it's basically the same idea lights coming on watch your eyes all right so now Ally you're going to rotate with me a little bit I've moved the light over to the side and since this is now a movie you don't acknowledge the camera anymore so this difference is enormous I mean I haven't changed the overall setup much but we have a really different feeling most of the time in any movie the light is coming from behind the subject and it makes a huge difference we could actually go even further here we can like almost move the light behind the subject and we still have like a really beautiful valid lighting set up but also notice on this so I'll look into the lens this feels like too dark when you actually are seeing straight into the eyes you would want like a catch light here or something look off camera again but as soon as she's off camera it works great the way that I think about it is if the subject is acknowledging the camera looking into the lens like I am now then you're probably going to have the light coming from the front if they're looking off camera pretending it doesn't exist then you want the light to be coming either from the side or [Music] behind when LED lights first became popular a lot of us were buying like 100 200 watt lights there's a really good reason you want a light way brighter than you think you need like all the time so for example with the fors of 500 that we're using today we have a lot of headro this means you're usually only using it at like 50 or 80% power That's The Sweet Spot that's where you want to be so for example in a shot here we can now see out the window a bit we can see the real window right here and then we can see it in the mirror as well and actually it's funny you can see this ND effect around my blurry finger we want to get it all darker like that so we basically want blue coming through the window to do that we have to turn up our light so right now we're only at 25% we're going to crank that all the way to 100 right now and now we're able to bring back the blue outside of those windows much better balance to the [Music] exposure so now we'll look at a new setup this isn't about balancing the window anymore now we just want to like balance the ratios get a nice fill inside of the room this is something I do all the time first of all turn off our 500 it's not going to be the key light got the nanite forza 60b much smaller we're just going to crank it up to 100 and this is our new key light now since we still have this very powerful 500 what are we going to do with it well I want to fill in that background and all we have to do is point it at a white wall or at the ceiling and crank it to 100 and now we've got this kind of soft fill that you really can only add with a big light source like that like look how much of the wall it's actually taking up it's kind of like having a 20t soft box here and this is a trick we use all the time just to give us that General lift to the overall exposure meanwhile our key light can kind of operate on its own there's a lot of times you want to turn up the power like if you're adding thicker diffusion maybe you're going to bounce the light before it goes through diffusion or you just want to move the light further away so whichever light you're thinking about picking up next go one step brighter than you think you need all the advice in this video can be used with whatever light package you're working with but some lights are nicer to work with than others Nite sponsored this video and the forza 500 Mark II is amazing the first Forza 500 was great I used it all the time but they've made some big improvements here like the single-handed Locking yolk it holds incredibly strong but you don't need two hands to adjust it there's also a more pronounced curve in this metal bracket that attaches to the stand so it's easier to go all the way down or all the way up it's extremely flexible but the biggest improvements happened around the ballot this is really well thought out and designed so now it can sit flat on the floor like this both of the cables come out of the top along with where the power button is it has full DMX support can also run off of just two batteries so you can just clip them to the side like that and you can run this thing at full power and you've got an insane portable kit that you can use outside power cables are thicker and more durable we've got a stronger handle on top and the way that it clamps onto the stand is very smart now it can go as wide as you need this is basically just a normal super clamp and it just clips into the back so you can safely secure it to anything check out the forza 5002 in the link below and thanks again to [Music] nanlite we all love soft light it's been a huge training in mography ever since we moved away from film where you needed bigger brighter lights so they were usually hard unless diffused the thing that took me a long time to realize is almost the only factor in making your light softer is the size of the source so take a look at these Shadows overall the the light is soft but you can still see strong Shadows on that side let's move to a much bigger Source this is 5x7 compared to 4x4 see how much softer it is so now everything's basically the same the light is just filling up this larger diffusion but it's the same material and you can see that the softness on her face is much softer the key thing here is the size of the light like relative to the distance of the subject so the further away the light is the bigger the source needs to be if you want it to be soft a small soft box is still soft up close but as you move further the diffusion needs to get bigger here's a quick one a lot of the time it's helpful to light a little bit from above instead of just from the side so right now light's going straight onto a the problem is if you look at the wall behind her even though the light on her is pretty soft we have these strong Shadows against the wall with objects in the background when you move to above so now that it's a bit above her we both get more flattering Shadows they kind of go under her chin so it just helps with that separation from subject and [Music] background next up bouncing light I see a lot of silver reflectors out there by default I see people starting off with silver and I can see why it's very bright it has the most output but it also looks really fake plus whenever it moves it kind of creates this like ripply effect so I think the default should more often be white it has less output but that also makes it look a lot more natural a lot softer and I think you'll agree this fil still does a lot there's no bounce add some bounce white is just by far the one you should be using the most often never use gold I don't know why that [Music] exists I'm sure you're already matching your color temperatures like daylight outside and tungsten indoors but it's actually more important to me that you're matching your tint meaning green or magenta unfortunately the fors of 500 can support that so looking at our image right now this is just the the forza 500 going through diffusion looks pretty nice uh but let's say I want to lift the rest of the scene and I'm going to turn on the lights in the background so the fluorescent lights and the nanl are both daylight balanced but the nanl is much more accurate and these fluorescents tint a little bit green so we can match them by adjusting the light our fluorescent lights in the studio are actually pretty well balanced I bought more expensive ones just for that purpose but in the real world sometimes it can be way off so having that adjustment on your light is really helpful let me know in the comments what is some lighting advice that you'd give your younger self what do you wish you learned earlier cuz for me it's a lot if you found this video helpful check out my YouTube versus cinematic video which goes through a lot of other techniques to change from a flatter simpler lighting to something a little more dramatic and why you would choose those two thanks again for watching guys I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Tyler Stalman

Views: 231,347

Keywords: Tyler Stalman

Id: F5zDzVQ43XA

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023