I've got a question for you. What do you think is the most important piece of equipment I use to do my work? I love good glass just as much as the next guy, but it isn't my lenses. I've put a lot of time and money into building my cinema rig, but my red is not my most important piece of equipment. In all honesty, the most important thing I use in my craft is this. No, not my office. This. Well, not the mirror. Light is the most important part of what I do. Painters shape paint. Musicians shape sound. And cinematographers, well, they shape light. Light is our media. It's the foundation of everything that we do. It doesn't matter what lens you use or what sensor your camera has-- full frame, crop sensor. Without light, you have no image. Every step of the cinematography process is based around light. Before I ever press record, I'm thinking about what sort of lighting setup I want to achieve, how I want the image to come across. I have to think about what that light will hit, and just as importantly, what it won't hit to create the image I want. That image enters the lens and hits the camera sensor, but doesn't just stop there. In post, everything I do is in an effort to shape and color and optimize that light. And if I do my job correctly, when that light is emitted from your screen and finally meets your eyes, it's one of the last things you notice. For a lot of independent creators, lighting is often one of the most overlooked parts of the process. At least it was for me when I first began my filmmaking journey. Because let's face it, the other components, like your lens or your camera, often outshine it. No pun intended. But if you take a look behind the scenes of any major production, you'll quickly realize that lighting is the number one priority when they begin to set the scene and prepare to bring their visions to life. This is because professional filmmakers understand one critical truth that a lot of hobbyists and freelancers just simply don't. Good lighting is invisible. Bad lighting is impossible to miss. Let's break this down. Many people, when they get into filmmaking and content creation, can get overwhelmed or intimidated with the idea of using video lights. They start out with something like maybe a light panel or a COB light with a big dome softbox. The moment you try and shoot up against bright, broad daylight backlit windows, you'll realize there becomes a pretty big issue. In filmmaking, especially once you start working with clients, you're not always going to be able to wait for the perfect time with the right ambient daylight. You either need to work with that existing lighting or overpower it. This means working with bigger and bolder lighting equipment for these challenging scenarios. I want to take you guys along with me to practice some of these lighting setups. I want to break down my mindset and approach to all of it and talk through some of my favorite lighting tools to utilize. The lights we're using today are some of the incredible lights from Nanlite. They sent me over their new Forza 60B Mark II, the Forza 300B Mark II, and the Forza 720B. These three lights together can do a lot, pretty much anything you could need. So I want to walk you guys through a few creative lighting setups, starting with this, this talking head shot here up against these windows. The camera we're going to be using is my Sony FX3 with the 24 to 70 2.8. But I really want to emphasize here that you do not need a expensive mirrorless or cinema camera. All of the lighting techniques and principles that I want to share with you guys today will work with any camera. OK, so right off the bat, as you can tell, if we expose for inside here, myself as the subject, we've got a lot of overexposure happening on the windows. What we need to do is correctly adjust our exposure for the light source that we can't control within our shot. We'll start with this circular ND filter. Now we should be able to adjust our exposure to get these windows under control. The first thing I want to do is bring in a key light, probably right around here, just off the side of our shot. For this setup, I decided to use the Forza 300B Mark II. And I wanted to achieve a very soft quality of light. Instead of using a standard dome softbox, I ended up bouncing the light off a 5-in-1 reflector and diffusing it through another large scrim. This lighting setup is called a book light. And it offers an extremely soft and naturally wrapping light. Our goal with lighting the shot is to essentially kind of trick you into believing that it's the big sliding glass windows on the right side of the frame that are naturally providing the light on myself as the subject. I want to use one more light to really help sell this shot. Splotches of hard sunlight are so naturally occurring in the world. And used strategically in a setup like this can really elevate the quality of your shot. I used the Forza 60B with the spotlight attachment to add a nice little hit of hard light in the frame. Spotlight attachments are amazing for the control that they offer. But also, the shadow quality and light quality is very reminiscent of sunlight because of how sharp and defined the shadows will look coming from this light. We can even take and use our Nanwing app here and change the color temperature of this light, maybe make it a bit warmer. Maybe that feels a little bit more believable. [MUSIC PLAYING] My goal with this scene was to create the classic wake up first thing in the morning. Sunlight hits your eyes. While this setup may seem pretty simple, it was a bit more challenging to accomplish here because of the way our room was set up. This window is eastern facing. There's some apartments kind of directly across the way. And so we don't really actually get any direct sunlight into this room. The blinds that we have in this window are a blackout blind. And so I decided to grab an extra curtain that we'd had from our old apartment, hang that up on a C stand to create a fake curtain. With all the interior lights off, we can see the shot overall looks pretty interesting. Definitely a certain type of vibe here. But again, we want that bright morning sunlight. To do this, we're going to use the Forza 720B with the Fresnel and Barn doors. The 720B has an incredible amount of power. And even though we're shooting in broad daylight with quite a bit of ambient light level, we can easily fake sunlight. Not to mention it's also bi-color. So we can nicely tune that color temperature to get that perfect color separation and that warm morning light. The Fresnel attachment is great because not only can we better shape the beam of the light, being able to spot or flood it and cut the light with barn doors, but it also increases the output of the light by a fairly considerable amount. I adjusted the curtains just a bit to allow some of that light to come in. And we can kind of have a hard streak of light kind of rake across the bed. It's like what we'll see hit my face. Because the walls in our bedroom are white, there was enough sort of just natural fill happening from the single light. We have tons of areas of light and dark throughout the frame creating really, really nice contrast. I love the way the hard light hits the back wall on the right side of the frame. I really think it helps to kind of draw your eye to myself laying down in the bed as you see me kind of reach up and turn off my phone alarm. My wife helps me by playing with the curtains and kind of wiggling them as if wind was kind of blowing through the window. Typically when you come in for coverage and you're getting these closer angles more often than not, you'll want to move the light source in closer to create a more flattering light. But I love the way this hard source looks, the quality of light. The 720B with the Fresnel I think plays perfectly as recreating natural sunlight here. [MUSIC PLAYING] [SHOWERS SOUNDS] [MUSIC PLAYING] I loved the idea of like a super moody, very dark shower scene, a close up of water drops going down like skin and then a steamy mirror bathroom portrait type of thing. I knew I wanted to do a single overhead light source for the shower. But getting a softbox or really any sort of light modifier up above the shower over the glass, kind of the way our whole bathtub is set up, tedious and difficult to say the least. So that's where the Forza 60B and the spotlight mount works so amazing because you can throw super precise shapes of light in pretty much any area you would want. I shined the light up into the ceiling and realized there was a lot of spill happening into the ambience of the bathroom. Again, we have white walls. So I knew I needed to control that light by using a tube dress of my wife's, just dug around in the closet. She walks in and sees me gafftaping it up to the ceiling. But sometimes you just got to use what you have and get creative. So after using this, the black material helps to stop the spill of all of the extra light throughout the bathroom and makes that single overhead light feel much more directional. Exactly like what I had in mind for this shot. For the mirror shot, we did the same thing. Just used the Forza 60B and the spotlight to put a tube shaped light right on the corner of the mirror. I also used this little softbox case thing wedged just to, again, help kind of control some of that spill into the bathroom to make sure we keep good contrast levels. Add in a little bit of steam from this little handheld closed steamer and turn on the bathroom sink to full blast. So it's just like more steam coming up. And I think we kind of nailed this one, to be honest. These new version two lights from Nanlite are incredible. On the 300B, not only does it have an updated design with the ballast and the head itself, but we also have green and magenta shift built into the light. This makes it extremely simple to color match it up against other light sources that might have a little bit of green or magenta cast. Nanlite's continued commitment and effort to creating lighting equipment that is accessible and fully functional to creators and professionals, even at the highest level, is impressive. And I have really, really enjoyed working with these new lights.
