In todays blogpost we look at another light source that we used during the workshop “Alternative light sources”.

 

As you guys probably know, when you shoot video it’s vital to also have some good lighting.
When we started filming our instructional videos we often used our Elinchrom strobes to light the scene by using the modeling lights, but bringing those on location…. pfff that’s a huge problem of course, and you sometimes hear the fans going on after a longer time, so it didn’t take long before we switched to using led panels.

 

At the moment we use two large led panels from LedGo for our Digital classroom broadcasts and instructional videos in the studio, and we use a smaller panel from LedGo for our location work. And this smaller panel is exactly what I used for the following images. Now a lot of people struggle with using led panels for photography if they want some real contrasty images, the panels often give off a nice wide spread and for video this is great, but for photography it’s often nice to have a more directional light source, so that’s where we often start to use grids. However there’s also another option.

 

Just like your strobes (and any other light source) you can “feather” your light, which in essence means you’re not aiming the light directly at your model, but you’re actually aiming the light away and use the sides of the light to light your model, the main advantage is that you get a more softer quality of light, but the trade off is that you also get a lot less lightoutput, and of course you have to be careful that you’re not lighting other areas with the full output of the light source that you don’t want in the shot.

 

For this setup I wanted to create a very moody light quality fitting the outfit and expression from Nadine, the main reason for this setup was that actually almost nobody believed we could pull off this kind of directional and sparse lighting on the model with a panel that has such a broad spread… I think the examples speak for themselves 😀