All courses / Shooting, story and sound
Light is the cheapest upgrade your video will ever get
A new camera costs a month's budget and improves your pictures slightly. Two lamps and the knowledge of where to put them changes them completely, and you probably already own the lamps.
One or two days on lighting people and objects with the equipment you have — including the fixtures you assume are too cheap to bring.
- Length1–2 days
- FormatOn site only
- LanguageNorwegian or English
- CategoryShooting, story and sound
After the course you can
Lighting for video
- Light an interview so it looks deliberate, in a room that was not designed for it
- Shaping light rather than just adding more of it
- Mix daylight with your own fixtures without going green
- Light people with different clothes, hair, and skin well, which is mostly about placement
- Know which of your existing lamps are worth using and which are not
What we cover
The program
How light behaves
- Hard and soft light, and what actually makes a source soft
- Distance, size and falloff — the three things that control everything else
- Color temperature, and how much of it survives the grade
- Reading light in a room before you plug anything in
Lighting a person
- Key, fill and back light, and why the conventions exist
- Shaping and negative fill — subtracting light instead of adding it
- Eyes: the single detail that decides whether a portrait works
- Lighting different hair, clothes, and skin well, and the common mistakes
- Glasses, bald heads, and the other things that go wrong
Real world settings
- The office with a window behind the chair
- Mixed daylight and fluorescent, and what to do about it
- Small rooms, low ceilings and bouncing off what is there
- Filming outdoors: Controlling sunlight
- Locations you cannot change: adapting rather than fighting
Setups that repeat
- Three and four light lighting — and when they fail
- A two-light interview setup you can build in ten minutes
- A one-light setup for when there is no time
- Matching a second day of shooting to the first
Equipment
- What your existing lamps can and cannot do
- Modifiers that make a cheap light good
- What is worth buying next, in order
- Power, cables and the practical realities of a location
The honest bit
Lighting advice online is often written by people with a rental account. This course is built around the assumption that you have three lamps, maybe of mixed quality, and fifteen minutes before the interview subject arrives — because that is the actual situation, and it is more solvable than it looks.
Who it is for
Anyone who films people: communication staff, content producers, journalists, photographers and video teams who shoot interviews, portraits and pieces to camera.
Prerequisites
None. Some camera experience helps, because lighting decisions and exposure decisions affect each other.
Bring
Every lamp you own, including the ones you never use. Also make sure the room you usually film in is available.
Questions
About this course
Do we need to buy lights before the course?
No. Bring what you have. Part of the point is finding out what your existing kit can do, and a shopping list built after the course is a much better shopping list.
Why is this on-site only?
Because lighting is physical. Moving a lamp fifteen centimeters and seeing what happens is the entire lesson, and that does not transmit over a video call.
Can this be combined with the camera course?
It is the natural pairing, and two days of camera plus one of lighting is a common booking. Exposure and lighting are the same subject approached from two ends.
Related courses
Related courses
1–2 daysCamera and shooting technique
The edit is where the trouble shows up.
1–3 daysVideo on a smartphone
Modern phones shoot material that holds up on any platform you are likely to publish on.
2 daysStorytelling for social video and short formats
A good story never goes out of fashion, but the patience your audience arrives with has collapsed.
Want this for your team?
Tell me what goes wrong today and you get a written plan and a price back. Two sentences is enough.