Lightening and Its Importance

 One of biggest mistake we make is poor lighting. Lighting is one of the most important elements to great cinematography and probably the least understood and least appreciated aspect of filmmaking with beginners most beginners assume you can just buy a nice camera and it'll make everything look great but, I’d say the opposite is true great lighting could make any camera look good here's a quick example of how much and pretty much can change just by changing the lighting. Contrast of light for light direction typically the shadows that a light casts are going to be more flattering on the human face when the light is coming from a direction just slightly above and slightly to the side of the subjects face that's one of the more popular looks in Hollywood films and most rookies will just use ceiling lights which will give your subject raccoon eyes or they'll just blast a ton of frontal light on the subject taking away any shadow at all which then makes the image look super flat and not very cinematic the second reason this image doesn't look very great is the light quality typically you want your key light which is the main light that lights up your subject to be a large light source like a soft box because the bigger the light source in relationship to your subject this off to the lights going to be which makes the shadow less harsh thus being more forgiving on the imperfections of the skin and most rookies images use too much hard light which is fine for the right scenario but learning how to soften your light in certain scenarios can help make your images look more flattering and the third reason is light contrast the background is the same brightness as the subject so there's no depth or separation of the subject from the background the image just looks flat and boring and most rookies do a poor job at creating depth in general and there's a lot of ways you can create depth like using foreground or leading lines but one of the best ways to have contrast is by using contrast of lighting so typically in talking heads like this your subjects going to be brighter than the background so that it draws your audiences I to the subject and not to the background so by controlling the light by lighting up your subject with a nice big soft key light maybe a little backlight to separate the subject from the background and maybe even some splash light of color on the wall to get some color contrast suddenly the image feels more three dimensional just by using lighting.