What Can Lighting Do For Me, Really?

When you use your camera, what you are doing is capturing light.

Did you know that?

It doesn’t matter if it’s a dslr or your phone, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been a professional videographer for over a decade, ahem, or not, that is what you are doing. You are using your camera to capture light.

We need light to get an image exposed on film or our camera’s sensor, of course.

So not only does lighting do this technical thing, but it’s also much more complex. It influences how we understand a scene because of literally what we are able to see, but also how we as a viewer experience it emotionally. 

You can light yourself 2, or really 3, different ways. 1 is by available light - whatever natural or man-made light is there, another way is with video lighting that you manipulate and control. 

The 3rd way is how I do it - a combination of natural light and lighting equipment. I usually record myself in the late morning. I record at that time of day because my primary light source is all the windows over here, and late morning gives me lots of bright, but indirect light because of how the sun travels over my house throughout the day. 

I also like this indirect light because of how lighting plays with emotions. Bright, morning sun can feel cheery, it can feel safe. And this is a cheerful, safe space.

But remember that the opposite is also true. A dark, moonless night can make your viewer feel tense or anxious. I don’t know your plans or goals for your video, so I don’t know, maybe that’s what you’re going for. 

You can also use lighting to direct the viewer’s eye. The human eye is drawn to bright areas of a frame. 

The angle of the light really affects how we see texture. 

Frontal lighting flattens and smooths over texture, whereas side lighting casts all these amazing shadows that really emphasize dimension and texture. 

Something to really pay attention to is trying to control the contrast of your image. Sometimes you can find yourself in a situation where you are using natural lighting, like the sun, which is great. But a challenge is that the sun is so bright that your camera doesn’t have the ability to capture all of the detail in the image. What I mean is that your highlights are totally blown out and you’ve lost all the detail in the image. 

This is the very reason why I keep my blinds halfway down. I experimented with different amounts of light when I was 1st setting up in this space. 

All the blinds thrown open is far too bright, with too many dark shadows on the wall behind me. 

So leaving them halfway down gives me the right amount of light for the background, and then I’ve added a small light on me, just to make sure I’m a little brighter than my background. 

People can get into seriously heated conversations about their opinions on the best camera, the best settings, etc, but lighting plays a huge role in the quality of your image and that is just not acknowledged enough. Good lighting can make a lower quality camera look really good, and bad lighting just looks bad.

So when you are ready to set up your lighting, ask yourself a couple of questions.

1 Do I want soft shadows for lots of texture, or a more diffused look?

2 What angle should my light come from in order to get more or less texture and drama

3 How bright am I in relation to other lights on camera, or in relation to how bright my background is