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How to build your own giant Roger Deakins style DIY ring light

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Ring lights are a big love-hate thing in the world of photography. Some people are actually quite passionate about the catchlight it can present in a subject’s eyes – believing that there’s only one way to use a ring light. But ring lights can produce some wonderful light on your scene, especially when used off-camera.

And that’s how this giant ring light is intended to be used. Inspired by Oscar-winning DP, Roger Deakins, Todd at Shutterstock shows us how to build our own in this video. It’s fairly straightforward to do if you’re comfortable with basic tools.

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How to create 5 different lighting setups in one room

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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.

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Here’s how to get five different looks using just one light

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Having only one light available doesn’t seem like it will give you many options for shooting. But in this video, Nerris Nassiri from Aputure will show you five basic key lighting patterns you can create with only one light. They’re commonly used in both photography and filmmaking to get a wide variety of looks, and they can help you tell different stories in your shots.

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How to create a classy portrait look with DIY lighting kit for under $100

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When you start to break out of using only the available light and start looking towards adding your own lights, it can get quite expensive rather quickly. Whether you’re shooting stills or video, quality lighting kit is just expensive. But it doesn’t have to be.

There are ways to create fantastic lighting looks on a much lower budget using commonly available cheap lights. In this video, Brent from ShareGrid, along with ShareGrid member Casey, shows us how we can create a fantastic lighting setup for portraits or interviews for less than $100.

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How to effectively light black & white shots for a dramatic look

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Lighting scenes for shooting in black & white is a little different from working with colour. For a start, you don’t have to worry about colour. Brightness, direction and quality of light come into play a lot more. This can simultaneously make shooting for black & white both easier and more challenging at the same time.

In this video, Nerris from the A-Team gets together with cinematographer Justin Jones to walk us through the thought process of shooting for black and white. [Read More…]

Here is how the position of light changes your portraits

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The position of light in relation with your subject can significantly affect the atmosphere of your shots. Depending on where you place the lighting, you can completely change the mood of the scene. In this video, Mark Wallace of Adorama teaches you the basics and gives you a quick preview of how the placement of light affects your portraits. If you’re new to portrait photography, you’ll find this especially useful.

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Objective & Subjective Lighting – What it is and how to do it

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Like many things in life, there’s no right or wrong way to learn photographic lighting… but I do believe there are easy ways and hard ways to not only understand it, but more importantly get better at it.

I think every creative discipline evolves, but photography sees more significant jumps in its evolution due to it being so uniquely tied to technology. Every frame we capture is taken with a camera and that camera technology is evolving on a daily basis. Every frame we then have to develop is primarily produced through software and that too evolves on a daily basis. The tools that we use to create our work are constantly changing but I feel that the way we learn some of the techniques associated with these tools do not.

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Here are three sub $20 way to create good diffusion for filming

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If you want to get soft flattering light, you would need to diffuse it. This video by Todd Blankenship, covers three ways to diffuse your point light source.

Of course, the first thing that Todd does is showing you how not to diffuse your light. As you may have guessed, simply throwing some baking paper on a light source will not diffuse it. If you clip the backing paper directly to the diffuser it just does not make your light source bigger.

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