Made the plunge - sort of

[David Delaney]

Renting the FX1, just trying things out. I like it so far. Right now, I have an interview talking heads style shoot coming up. Is there a book on lighting that would really help me out?

[Tom Tanquary]

There are many books out there on lighting that go from aweful to truly amazing. One of the best is "Placing Shadows: Lighting Techniques for Video Production" which is purely about lighting as an art form. And then there's my book, "Portable Video: ENG & EFP" which contains a good lighting chapter but deals with overall production as well. You can find one-stop book shopping at the Focal Press website (which is now under Elsevier). They have over a hundred titles, including these two, so you needn't look anywhere else for books. But you can buy the books anywhere, like Amazon.com.

There's one main idea in lighting: "It's not what's lit, it's what's not lit that counts." If you understand this concept, lighting is a snap.

Hope this helps.

Tom


http://books.elsevier.com/us//focalbooks/us

[Carlos E. Martinez]

Originally Posted by Tom Tanquary

There's one main idea in lighting: "It's not what's lit, it's what's not lit that counts." If you understand this concept, lighting is a snap.

Completely agreed on that concept.

Another one: always shoot from the shadows.

A quite interesting exercise, which you can try in real life, is look at things for a moment and identify what light sources are hitting them. Count them and try to put some comparative value to each, say brighter = 8, darker = 4.

If you can then do the same through a viewfinder and/or LCD screen.

This simple exercise will train your eye to see things in contrast terms.

[Steven Gotz]

There is a DVD on that very subject. Look into this one:

http://www.vortexmedia.com/LightingDVD/LIGHTING.html

[Heath McKnight]

This is a great DVD and Victor Milt is amazing! I saw his film at Palm Beach International Film Festival.

http://vasst.com/search.aspx?entity=...&sort=priority

hwm