12/05/2021
The importance of lighting
The camera settings are the same for the 3 scenarios:
ISO 200, 60fps, 1/120, f5.6
Why do we need to light our subject?
- Lighting our subject help us see the subject clearly. In emergence of low light cameras, many videographers have taken for granted lighting (including myself lol) and so just depends on the ISO capability of the camera, especially Sony Cameras like the Sony A7s series. While these cameras do have that capability, it won't apply to all situation. A great example would be a high dynamic range lighting situation. What it means is that the highlights is too high so when you try to expose for the highlights, the subject would be severely underexposed just like in this demo. In this situation, it is better to have a strong light so you could still expose for the highlights without underexposing your subject. The disadvantage of just relying on post production to properly expose your subject is that it would introduce noise on the image, especially if the subject is severely underexposed. It could be remedied by denoising it but there is a trade-off especially if your subject is too much underexposed. Your image will soften after denoising the image. If you just rely on post production and never light your subject, you could not properly "shape" the subject, aside from introducing noise on your image. This is for another demo 😃
In this demo, I used a Nanlite FS-300 (a 300w COB LED) so I could properly expose the subject (myself lol) even when I exposed for the highlights, but even then I could not properly expose for the highlights without myself being underexposed. I was targeting for 50 IRE for myself to be properly exposed (see Ansel Adam's Zone System to have proper guidance on good exposure) so I was forced to bump up the aperture from F8 to F5.6 The proper aperture so I could properly expose for the highlights in this demo should have been F8 but since I was targeting for 50 IRE, I bumped it up. I do admit that this was a mistake. In this situation, it should have been ok to underexpose myself a bit since I was inside the house. It was ok to target 40-45 IRE in this situation so the highlights would be properly exposed, or at least I could expose it so I could have more details on the highlights.
This is just 1 example why we need a strong light. There are still many reasons why you need to have those big, strong lights. A good example would be if you want your lighting to be very soft. That would be for another topic 😉
