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?

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

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.

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

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

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=16&category=Lighting&sort=priority

hwm