Vidize Blog

Poor video lighting isn’t something you can only find on the web. Amateur videos of all sorts suffer from its effects.

I wrote a little article on three-point lighting at the Wikipedia that describes the most basic lighting setup.

The three point lighting setup may be simple but it’s useful in 80% of cases – or even close to 100% if you’re shooting talking heads.

Let me give you an example of a bad lighting setup (see the image on the right). Both shots come from interviews that Miranda July did for her indie movie.

As you can see there’s a remarkable difference when you go from top to bottom. Note: the second one was shot by iFilm.

So what are the guys at iFilm doing right? Here’s a short list for you:

• Use soft light – a single large softbox is enough
• Use a fill light – if you don’t have a large softbox
• Use a back light – see that highlight on her hair, it creates much needed separation between subject and background
• Use a background light – if you’re shooting talking heads, it’s best if you use a background light with a color filter (blue) to improve the separation between subject and background

Apart from lighting, it seems that a little make up and a soft filter complete the magic.

For portraits, I recommend Tiffen’s Warm Soft/FX lens filters. Just make sure you turn the auto-focus off because sometimes it will hunt attemting to focus on the small particles in the lens filter.

Tags: filter, gonzo, journalism, lighting, user generated content, web2.0

filter, gonzo, journalism, lighting, user generated content, web2.0