You do not need fancy expensive lighting equipment. My main key light (keylight being, the main source of light for your scene) I use by my desk is this knock off LED panel that cost around £100. Granted, I do use a lot of Aputure lights too, but these are not necessary to make good videos. When I started out, my key light was a joke, I literally made a softbox out of paper.
Now both of our studios here have no natural light (sun light), so all light is artificial. That actually suits me better. Whilst sunlight can look really nice, it’s not constant, it moves, and it dips behinds clouds. This means you have a changing exposure, which ultimately means your lighting is changing whilst you film - which generally does not look so good.
Now don’t freak out if you have to shoot something where you’re relying on sunlight, people do it all the time, just be aware of the sun position, and the fact that it can change. Things like sun position is probably something most of you, like me, aren’t interested in when shooting your videos. I’ve never needed to think about that for my YouTube videos, but for my commercial work, if I’m shooting at a particular location, and in a particular direction, then it’s important to know exactly where the sun will be at a certain time, and there is a website for that.
So most of the time, I’m working where I have complete light control, like in here. I have a number of lights that are always rigged up, and can be easily switched on or adjusted. I say “easily”, ‘as easy as it can be’, there is always some shifting things around to suit the scene you’re trying to shoot, but yeah I do my best to try and make this as easy as possible. Things like these railings, or having a number of lights that stay in one place, rather than one light that you’re always moving.
There’s nothing particularly complicated about my lighting.. My key light lights my face, this is a light with a large surface area, so it’s nice and soft. If you imagine light coming from 1 small point, it’s going to be very directional, and you’ll get lots of harsh shadows everywhere - whereas if you imagine a large soft source, light is coming from more places, so you’ll get a softer spread of light. I’d pretty much always set my keylight temperature to daylight (5600K). This is because daylight brings out your nice skin tones. Earlier on under camera settings, I talked a little about colour temperature, and how the temperature is measured in Kelvin, hence the ‘K’ - with a low Kelvin setting like 3000K being very warm, and a high Kelvin temperature like 8000K being very cold.
Nowadays, most lighting is actually LED’s, rather than an actual bulb, like it used to be. This is great because they don’t get as hot, and also it means you can light with daylight, and different colours too. There’s more flexibility there, right at your fingertips. I say ‘at your fingertips’ because so many of these lights now can be controlled via an app, or a remote control.
So yeah, whilst I pretty much always use daylight to light my face, so we can bring out those skin tones, I might use some of these RGB bulbs or tubes for the backdrop, and set them to a red or a blue or something..
but this is all fancy stuff that you don’t really need. Like do you really think these tubes are the make or break of my story telling ability.. No, no they’re not. The most important thing for me, is that the exposure is looking good on my face. A simple LED light panel like this one is probably one of the best things you can buy to get started - just make sure you get one with a remote, so much easier.
