LIGHTING for Video
by Mark Ahn
Whether it be for a talking head, product shot, or a landscape, understanding the quality and quantity of light will tremendously improve the quality of your video. Most, if not all of us, shoot one form of a talking head or another, so our lighting tip (and maybe a trick or two) will cover the technique called three-point lighting.
Three-point lighting is the basic lighting set-up for a talking head shot we all learn in Video 101...it's a technique that, if done right, renders a nice, safe image of your subject. This technique consists, as the name suggests, three points of light source:
- The Key/Main Light
- The Fill Light
- The Back/Hair Light
The Key light is the primary light source. It provides a base light for your subject, and if you're in a pinch, it'll work as your only source of light.
The Fill light provides a bit of fill into the shadow area of your subject to balance out the contrast created by the key light. The quantity of the fill light is significantly less than the key light, and in fact, a reflector could often be used as a fill.
The Back/Hair light is used to provide separation from your subject and the background, especially if you shooting low-key lighting. It also adds a bit of accent to the hair and shoulders of the subject.
An addtional light that we found to be critical in the overall feel of a talking head shot is the background light. This light adds a simple splash of light the background area of the shot to break up a plain looking background, or to add accentuate a particular background element that may be relevant to the subject.
What Works for Us
After shooting countless hours of talking heads, we've come up with a formula that has worked well for us. We use four lights sources: key, fill, back/hair, and background. The fill is almost always a reflector. Although you can't quite see the actual background light in the image below, you can see what effect it has on the bookshelf. We usually have a diffuser on the backlight to ease up on its intensity, and our key light is scrimmed off with a diffusion panel from LightForm.
The diffusion panel softens up the key, resulting in softer shadow. The fill from the reflector is there just to slightly balance out the contrast caused by the key light. You can really see the effect of the background light on the shelf. The harsh shadows from the vase and magazine holders were intentional to create an early morning sunlight feel. We had an orange gel over our background light to create the warmness in the background.
An important thing to keep in mind in using background lights is contamination (or spill) from your key light. You want to minimize the amount of light that spills onto the background area so you have complete control with your background light. Also, in this shot, our overall base light is relatively low so we can open up the aperture to create a shallow depth of field. Camera to subject distance and subject to background distance also helps in controlling the depth of field (notice how far the camera is from the subject and how far the subject is from the background).