First Things First — Lighting Production

Lighting is the part of production where spending money helps least and understanding helps most. A person who understands one light will beat a person with six who does not.

1. Decide where the light comes from

Before anything else: what is your key — the main source — and where is it?

A single source, off to one side and slightly above eye level, is the foundation of nearly every good portrait ever lit. Not straight on, which is flat, and not overhead, which is what your office ceiling is doing to everyone right now.

If you have one light, this is the decision. If you have a window, this is still the decision.

2. Make it bigger

The single most useful fact in lighting: the larger the source relative to the subject, the softer the shadows.

A bare bulb is small and produces hard, unflattering shadows. The same bulb through a diffuser, or bounced off a white wall or ceiling, becomes a large source and produces soft, flattering light.

This is free. Bouncing a light off a wall costs nothing and does more than buying a more powerful light.

3. Control what you do not want

Subtraction matters as much as addition. Turn off the overhead fluorescents fighting your key. Close the curtain behind the subject. Flag the light spilling onto the background.

A piece of black card in the right place improves an image more than another light in the wrong one.

4. Separate the subject from the background

A subject and a wall lit to the same brightness look flat. Fix it by lighting them differently: let the background fall darker, add a light behind and above the subject to rim their shoulders, or move the subject away from the wall so it defocuses.

5. Match colour temperature

Mixed colour temperature is what makes footage look wrong in a way people cannot name — daylight from the window at ~5600K, tungsten lamps at ~3200K, and office fluorescents doing something green in between.

Pick one temperature. Gel or turn off the sources that disagree. Then set white balance to match, manually.

6. Then buy lights

With direction, size, control, separation and colour understood, better lights make things better. Before that, more lights make things more complicated.

The order, restated

1. Direction of the key
2. Size of the source
3. Subtraction and control
4. Separation
5. Colour consistency
6. More or better lights

The India footnote

Flicker. India runs on 50 Hz mains. Shooting at frame rates and shutter angles that do not divide cleanly into 50 Hz produces rolling bands under some lights — especially cheap LED panels and older fluorescents.

Shoot at 25 or 50 fps with a shutter matched to it, and test any unfamiliar venue's lighting on camera before the event. Footage advice from an American tutorial shot at 60 fps under 60 Hz mains does not transfer.

Heat. Lights heat rooms that are already hot. In a small studio in summer, the lighting plan and the air-conditioning plan are the same plan.

Venue lighting is for the audience. Halls are lit so people can see, not so cameras can. Assume you will need to add light to the stage or accept high ISO, and raise it with the organiser early rather than on the day.

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Gloworks is a video production and live streaming studio in Bengaluru.