Mixing Lights for an Interview

On this video, photographer Jay P. Morgan from the website the Slanted Lens looks at mixed lighting situations with Vector lights.

On this episode Morgan goes to do an interview at a Mannequin Gallery where he faces some challenging lighting situation with the existing light in the room. Morgan picks a 35mm lens in order to capture both the speaker and some of the surrounding (he will also used a second camera with a 70-200mm lens), he shoots at f/5.6 @1/50 second.

As a general role for interviews – if your talent is a busy person – try and use a different person to be in its place for the set up stage – this way you can prepare with ease and only bring in the talent when you are ready.

Where Morgan was shooting there was quite a bit of ambient light and he needed to decide what to do with it and how to work with this light and his LED lights. By changing the color of his lights Morgan tries to bring his lights closer to the ambient light in the room. To supplement the Rosco 8 x 8″ LitePad Vector CCT LED Light Morgan also uses a fill card on the other side just to give a tiny bit of fill. You can be done with this setup but Morgan adds a rim light for the hair in the back with another LitePad with a grid. Finally Morgan adds another LitePad to light a bit of the far background.

We have covered other combinations of lighting including “How to Use Continuous Light and Strobes Together” by Morgan as well as Mixing HMI and LED Lights.

You can find lot more lighting tutorials on our photography lighting section here on LensVid, and you can find all of Jay P. Morgan’s videos here on LensVid on the following link.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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