Basic lighting tips to improve your video

(bell ringing) - Hey, I have a bright idea. Let's talk about light. Shooting video is all about light. After all, without light you just have a dark frame. See what I mean? This isn't very interesting to look at. (snapping) Ah, there we go. So let's talk about some simple things you can do to make sure you have good light. First, if you don't have any professional lighting equipment, you can still make sure you have good lighting by placing yourself next to a window, like I am here. By using a bright window as my main source of light, I'm able to not only light myself but my background as well. Now if you don't have access to a window, you can also use household lamps or professional lights to light yourself. However, when doing this it's important to know how to do a basic three point lighting setup. So let's jump in to what that is and how you can achieve it. A three point lighting setup is a basic lighting setup that involves three lights. First up is the key light. The key light is your main light source and is usually positioned off to either the left or right of you at an angle. In this example, I'm using the natural light from a window as my key light. Next up is the fill light. The fill light is there to well, fill. Its job is to cut down on shadows by filling in the areas of your face that the key light is missing. It's positioned on the opposite side of your key light, again at a similar angle. And finally is the backlight. The backlight is a major key in your lighting setup to help separate you from the background. Similarly to the fill light, it should be placed on the opposite side of the key. By doing so. this gives you an edge of light on your darker side that helps make you pop and stand out from the background. Now while a three point lighting setup is great, I recommend adding some extra lights to fill out your background. By adding a light or two to your background, you can add depth and interest to your shot. You can do this easily too by just turning on a lamp. Okay. You know the basics of lighting but where things get really tricky is when you have mixed lighting. You might remember from the white balancing video that for our purposes, there's basically two types of lights. Tungsten and daylight. Well, mixed lighting is when you have light sources that are both tungsten and daylight. For example, you might have daylight come in through a window as well as tungsten light from a lamp. It's best to avoid mixed lighting by either blocking out daylight by closing your curtains or by getting rid of tungsten lights by turning off lamps and overhead lighting in a room. However, this is mainly most important for the light that's directly lighting you. If let's say you're using daylight from a window to light yourself and you want to turn on a lamp in the background to help add some background light, that's totally okay. The most important thing to remember is that you want the light that's lighting you to be all the same color temperature. That's it. Now you can let there be light. (lights sizzling) Oh shoot. I guess I forgot to pay my electricity bill again.