Brightness and color temperature.
Breakfast foods grow odder and odder: It’s a wise child that knows its own fodder. — Ogden Nash, “Snap, Crackle, Pop” As with foods, so with lights: between LEDs, HMIs, plasmas, and fluorescents, it’s hard to know exactly what you’re…
[Update 23 March: event coverage at Sound & Picture.] The Digital Cinema Society is having its annual Lighting Technology Event in Burbank, California this coming Saturday, 21 March. Almost twenty manufacturers and vendors will be showing off incandescent, fluorescent, and LED lights,…
In which I test several color meters (an Asensetek Lighting Passport, two Sekonics, and a Minolta) side-by-side; compare the spectral quality of various lights; and may have figured out one reason why color meters often overestimate required tint corrections. (Updated 10 March…
Shane Hurlbut’s Illumination Experience cinematography education tour finally wrapped this past weekend in Los Angeles, successfully completing a three-month tour of 26 cities across the United States. If you were one of the fortunate folks who attended his Lighting Masterclass…
The bread-and-butter work in my area is corporate marketing projects, and plenty of those involve talking head videos. And plenty of those talking heads wear white shirts. This is what I do about it… White shirts aren’t as deadly as…
Since my college days I’ve been driven to learn how other DP’s light: what units they use, where they put them, how they blend them together. Behind-the-scenes photos, while immensely helpful, are rare these days, but I’ve found significant lighting…
[Updated September 2016: Lumu is no longer supported on Android. Apparently the audio-jack interface on Android is too inconsistent to allow the Lumu to function well across the wide variety of devices.] Lumu is a $149 incident-light metering attachment for iOS…
Shameless commercial message: my latest iOS app for camerapeople, Cine Meter II, has just been released for sale by the App Store: Cine Meter II turns your iPhone®, iPod touch®, or iPad® into a shutter-priority reflected light meter, an RGB waveform monitor, and…
Due to the success of last year’s lighting class Abel Cine has asked me to come back and do it again. So I am: “How to Light Faces: Hard Light, Soft Light and Damage Control” It will be held on…
A gaffer once called me a “picky lighter.” I take pride in that designation, but I also take pride in working fast. Here’s a new soft light trick I’ve been thinking about. I have one goal when it comes to…