Making movies
LED there be light!
Lighting is an important factor of shooting good video. We illuminate the LED fixtures you should consider
Continuous LED lighting avoids such complexity. Conveniently cold to the touch, these have taken over from the hot-running and very large tungsten and HMI lights. Smaller and lighter, LEDs do not need to warm up, nor do they require vast power generators. They’re flicker-free and often controlled wirelessly and remotely via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Talking ’bout an evolution The original fixtures used small clusters of LED bulbs and were daylight-balanced or bicolour to provide a match with daylight or tungsten light. These were used in everything from small on-camera units to large and soft light panels. Here, brightness is adjusted via a dial, as is colour temperature. Next came colour LEDs in RGB for red, green and blue – then RGBWW, with two flavours of white: cool and warm. So it’s now possible to obtain any colour your heart desires, which is good for adding creative effects. You can usually dial in gel colours, too. Although adding coloured LEDs means there are fewer white diodes, and so the overall power is reduced compared to a daylight panel of the same size and power rating. What many wanted was more power, a wider choice of colours and the ability to employ light modifiers – like large softboxes, fresnel lenses and projector attachments. These are “You could go the DIY route and use builders’ lights, or even your own household ones. But the majority will flicker”
WORDS BY ADAM DUCKWORTH
PART SEVEN This series is designed to help you get to grips with the essentials of filmmaking. In every 2023 issue, we’ve been covering key parts of the process. Follow along each month and, by the end of the year, you’ll have all the advice to be the next Spielberg! Your guide is Adam Duckworth, editor-in-chief of our sister title Pro Moviemaker. This feature covers continuous lighting. advantages, though, for example their what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature. There’s no guessing what the results will look like, as with flash. For filmmaking, purpose-built LED lighting rules. Of course, you could go the DIY route and use builders’ lights, or even your own household ones. But the vast majority flicker, which looks awful on screen. We can’t see it with our naked eye, but cameras pick it up when the frequencies of the light source and sensor are out of sync. This can be avoided by using 50Hz PAL TV frequency from the UK rather than the US’s 60kHz NTSC, then setting the right frame rate and shutter speed. It can be complicated, but there are charts published of the frame rates and shutter speeds that can be safely used. WHETHER WE’RE TALKING still photos or video, quality lighting will transform an image from being little more than a record of a moment into something far more evocative, eye- catching and moody. Masters of the art search out the best natural light, which often means determining the right time of day, and then sculpt it with reflectors to make their subjects appear incredibly three-dimensional, even on a 2D screen or print. Many of us employ artificial light to lift highlights, act as key or hair lights, create washes of colour with gels, or just add some illumination when levels are low. A key difference between shooting stills and moving images is that while flash is popular for photography, it doesn’t work for video; filmmaking requires continuous lighting. These aren’t quite as bright as flash and can’t freeze action like a quick burst from a strobe – if they did offer flash- like levels of brightness, we would blind our subjects! Continuous lights have plenty of
Issue 109 | Photography News 27
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