AN INTRODUCTION TO LIGHTING FOR DIGITAL FILMMAKING - page 1

INTRODUCTION

The objectives of this material are to give you exposure to:

1. Basic lighting concepts

2. Affordable and/or critical lighting equipment

3. Basic lighting techniques

4. Hard to get information

5. References to more information

What Will Be Covered/P>

First of all, I'm completely self-taught, so about 5 years ago, I knew very little of this material. I definitely knew less than anyone who has studied still photography. But I have a passion for beautiful images, so I learned by practice, by reading, and by asking questions.

I'll start with a very short section on the physics of light, and then move on to a long discussion of all those nifty toys you can play with while lighting, and I'll finish with basic techniques. It may be annoying or exasperating that we'll spend so much time talking out equipment and theory, but I don't see a way to efficiently talk about techniques until we all know a little bit about the reasons why things work and the tools that we have available, so please humor me as we slog through the first stuff.

We will not talk about any techniques that require a shipping container full of money; all of the equipment discussed can be bought by a motivated amateur or locally rented for reasonable sums. Nor will we talk about most specialty techniques such as lighting for blue screen work, shooting inanimate objects, and dramatic lighting such as flares and silhouettes.

Finally, we will avoid most camera-related topics, unless that are at least affected by lighting, so we won't talk about interlacing and/or progressive scan (frame) mode, image stabilization, etc. But since some of this is of interest, I've included in the appendix a handy "cheat sheet" written by Mike Nicholson of Picturebox Productions, for giving video a more film-friendly look.

Why bother to spend all of this time learn all this stuff? Why spend all of the money for equipment or expertise? You have to believe that film is foremost a visual medium. If you want to convey a complex idea, a book is probably a better medium. A film, on the other hand, strives to tell a story visually first, and then with sound. A director of photography or cinematographer is a collaborator in the process of story telling.