How to create 5 different lighting setups in one room

Lighting a room can be deceptively difficult. You’d think it would be straightforward, but it’s easy to do it badly if you’re not careful. In this video, Jay P Morgan walks us through five different lighting setups in one room. Jay uses LiteCloth LED panels for the demonstration, but you could just ass easily do this with most other types of continuous light or flashes with the right modifiers.

The first two setups are to enhance a daylight setting. The first being big window light. Yes, there’s a lot of nice natural window light coming into the room already, but it’s a little overpowering. If you open up the aperture to get a good exposure on the subject, the windows blow out to pure white. If you expose for the windows, the subject is too dark. So, 2×2 and 3×1 LiteCloth panels were added to raise up the ambient light inside the room. This allows Jay to get a good exposure inside without blowing out the windows.

But LED panels isn’t all Jay uses to help enhance an interior. He also carries around a case of actual light bulbs with him. These replace the bulbs in practical lights in the room to help ensure better colour consistency throughout the room.

The other three setups involve turning day into night. One particularly cool effect shown here is attaching one of the LED panels to the ceiling using velcro. This might be a little tricky if you’re using big strobes, although a good solid boom arm can help. Although, obviously, you won’t be able to raise it quite as high as an LED stuck to the ceiling.

I would’ve loved to have broken each of the setups down for you here, but there’s so much information in this video that it’s difficult to really do it justice. And Jay explains them very well, building each up one light at a time and showing you exactly what each one does as he adds it.