Light-diffusing material (just plain diffusion in professional jargon) softens directional light by scattering it. In the short version, that’s all there is to tell, but selecting, mounting and fine-tuning diffusion is one of the gaffer’s subtler arts. The rest of this column is the long

Shooting “day-for-night,” of course, means recording night scenes in daylight. It’s done all the time because casts and crews tend to be less grumpy in the afternoon than at midnight and because lighting a large night exterior takes a truck full of lights, a honking-big generator a

Nothing can match a professional lighting outfit, and one to three thousand dollars is a fair price for a matched set of lights, stands, cables, and accessories, all in a sturdy, fitted case or two. If you don’t need a full kit, don’t use lights all of the time or just don’t have t

Why are we always harping on three-point lighting? You know: key light, fill light and back light? Even when it’s done well, it’s a clich and, when badly done, the result is as hokey as a yearbook portrait. Since it’s widely used in theater, still and movie lighting, this venerable

When you light a set or location, you're not just cranking out lumens to get a good f-stop. You're painting the scene with light, and a powerful painting tool in your kit is the cookie. Cookies are big cards with patterns carved out of them and placed in front of

Want to get instant respect and impress your clients and subjects? Show up to your next video shoot with a K77 Interview Lighting Kit from Smith Victor and watch their eyes get wide with excitement. Not only will you look professional, this versatile light kit will make your videos look stunning and

Many camcorders come equipped with a built-in light. Though it has more drawbacks than advantages, you can at least use it to throw some extra illumination at your subjects. Nonetheless, you can’t really "light" with it, as we think of lighting in this column. So let’s see how

You’ve seen the claims: “Outstanding reproduction in low light.” Cameras with low-lux ratings are the norm, and manufacturers seem intent on seeing just how low they can go. Claims of 2 lux, 1 lux, 0.75 lux and even 0 lux are not uncommon. What do these ratings really mean? What i

Just as a weed is any plant, however pretty, that sprouts where you don’t want it, spill is any light that falls where it doesn’t belong. Pro videographers and gaffers use great ingenuity in controlling light spill, but you can master the basics fairly quickly. Nearly all spill control

Whether you’re lighting a video with ten kilobucks worth of hi-tech hardware or making do with available light, you have two basic ways to go with each light source: hard or soft – either a high-powered beam with clean edges or else a softer glow that falls off gradually. How do you cr

"White" light ranges from the steely blue of outdoor open shade to the rosy orange of a household lamp on a dimmer. Your camcorder can produce a neutral white from any one of these different color temperatures, but only from one at a time. If you’re lighting a location that includes

From time to time we’ve suggested ways to beat the high cost of lighting equipment by buying or building your own. So let’s pull all those tips together into a survey of guerrilla lighting tools. We’ll cover lights and lighting instruments, reflectors hard and soft, and diffusion s

Dear Goldilocks, You say you don’t believe work is keeping me too busy to write and what’s a gaffer anyway, some job on a fishing boat? That hurts, Goldy, really hurts. 🙁 You wanna know what a gaffer does? Lemme tell you about today. All 20+ hours of it. The scene sounds simple in an

Who needs colored lighting for your video these days, since your digital post system lets you dial in any hue you want? Digital color filters let you do some amazing things, but they can look, well, digital. There is still no substitute for soft, natural-looking, colored light in digital video prod

We all know that if you mix red, blue and green paint together, you get a nasty, ugly brown. However, did you ever consider what happens when you mix red, blue and green light? The result is white. White light is a combination of various amounts of red, blue and green light. This phenomenon is preci

There’s nothing more satisfying than finding just the right thing to give your videos a fresh new look. Three types of camcorder lens accessories – lens filters, wide-angle lens adapters and telephoto lens adapters – offer you extra flexibility and creativity when you begin to acqu

We spend a great deal of time talking about three-point lighting, lighting your talent’s face and other general lighting techniques. However, we rarely talk about lighting the background of a shot. It’s not that lighting backgrounds is unimportant, we just tend to think about the subjec

We spend a great deal of time talking about setting up lighting for interviews and single camera work. While this is very helpful, it ignores two distinct lighting problems that you may run into; the moving subject and/or multiple cameras. In this column, we will take a look at these two distinct li

Lighting is a powerful tool for setting moods and manipulating emotions. Extreme care is taken to light feature films to create precisely the right emotion for a scene. But you don’t have to have a million-dollar budget to create moods with light. Even a single lamp can be used in subtle or d

Some may think that shooting in low light or after dark is not possible, but in many cases, the lack of light may allow you to create an artsy, vignetted scene bathed in pools of light. Following are six tips, and a couple cautions, for shooting video after the sun goes down. Tip 1: Use a Wide-angle