From the course: Corporate Video

Lighting with fewer lights

From the course: Corporate Video

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Lighting with fewer lights

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- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington, - And I'm Robbie Carman. - And this week, we're going to continue our look at talking about shooting an interview in an office. And one of the points I think is really critical to remember is, oftentimes, unless you're dealing with maybe the CEO of the company, offices aren't that big. You can't fit as much gear in there as you might think. - No they're not very big, in a lot of situations, and you know, lights take up space. And not only do lights take up space, they generate heat, and it makes it hard for people to move around, in that space. There's a whole bunch of problems with it, and it might also be just as simple as, you don't have the tools available, right? You have to get the interview, but you have to improvise a little bit, in terms of the lighting of the room. Now fortunately, every office that I've ever been in, has had overhead lights of some sort, and probably a desk light of some sort as well. Those are practical tools that you can use, to your advantage. - Yeah, now the overhead lights may not be flattering, and a lot of times in offices you'll have fluorescents that may cause flicker or a little bit of audible noise or hum. So you got to be very careful with those overhead fluorcescents. Like we've turned the fluorescents off here, the newer the office, the better they tend to be though. - Right, a lot of the times especially in newer offices where they might have flipped out from fluorescent to LED lighting, that LED lighting might even be dimmable, which is a great asset to have in terms of overhead, right? Being able to quickly dim the lights down, and control the intensity of it. Now when it comes to desk lights, the biggest problem that you're going to find is color temperature as far as I'm concerned, right? People in general don't like very white, daylight-type, lighting. People tend to go for, in terms of a working environment, something that is a little more tungsten-y, a little more warm in terms of overall color temperature. So one of the things that you might want to consider having in your kit, and it's really cheap to do, just by going down to the local hardware store, is to have a couple options of light bulbs. Just regular old light bulbs or LED bulbs that you could change the color temperature, so very quickly you could quickly switch out to use the existing lighting in the office, but be able to change the color temperature. - Yeah, and you might also take a look nearby. A lot of times, in bigger rooms or common areas, there may be some floor lamps or fixtures that you can drop in and use, and we did that in this room. We found a floor lamp that was available in a nearby common area, and that really helped fill in the light. Now, one of the things that I think a lot of people miss, is that in a small space, the ceilings are often lower. So bouncing light up into the ceiling and back down. - Or even off walls too. - Is a great way to diffuse it. If you point the light right at the subject, it tends to overpower them and get really glaring. But you bounce it off the ceiling or off a wall, and all of a sudden, it's nice and diffused. - Now, in a lot of office environments like this, you're going to have one asset that you might not think about as a tool, and that would be a computer screen of some sort, right? Computer screens these days can get very, very bright. So if you position it right, position your camera right, you can actually use that computer screen as a lighting source. I've done this quite a bit with, using it as a fill light, on the side of somebody's face for an in interview. You could even do things like you could put some diffusion gels or something like that over the computer screen, as long as you hide them, they're going to be a nice soft light coming from that computer screen. - And having some of your own lights are going to be useful. For example, I just had one back here on the wall. A small, little, USB light that was in my kit. And a couple of these are super cheap, they're about $15 a light, they're easy, you can drop 'em on the floor to fill in spaces, or add additional light. You also want to have a few, battery operated lights in your kit that you can drop into places. These type of lights are great for just filling things in. - And then finally, I would say, don't forget about your mobile device a lighting source. And now I know, that seems a little funny, and one of the challenges of using a mobile device as a lighting source is that you're going to probably move it around a little bit, but you know, my iPhone gets pretty darn bright. And if I put it on a white field on that phone, and then hold it underneath somebody, I can get a nice fill light, kind of lighting them underneath and so on. So that's another option. When it comes to lighting an office environment, I think its really about leveraging what you have and trying to make small fixes to get better consistency of the lighting, but in a lot of office environments, there is a lot of light already to work with. - Alright, well, another thing to think about is just because the office space is small, doesn't mean you have to lug in light stands. So up next, were going to talk about ways to attach lights in the environment.

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