Videography lighting is an ever present challenge in my world. Sometimes the lighting situation is perfect and needs only a few tweaks from my own lighting kit. Sometimes, not so much.

Recently I shot at Well Spring, a retirement community in Greensboro, NC. My first set up was in an on-site theater and the lighting was easy as existing lights in the theater made my job of lighting pretty simple. However, I then had to shoot in a lobby setting that was a bit of a puzzle.

The lobby was fully lit by overhead lights and the effect was an overall beige blah-ness. I started to sweat a little with how I was going to make this look good.

Adding to the situation were two museum-like curio cabinets which displayed artifacts. The cabinets threw out some tungsten light themselves, but that got lost in the overhead room lighting. I finally decided to turn off the overheads. I was slightly worried about visibility in case some elderly resident should come into the area, but luckily that never happened.

Once the overheads were off, the eye focused on the subject, but now the background was uninteresting in the opposite direction— it was too dark.

I decided to add accent lights to create pools of warmth bouncing off the walls. And now the curio cabinets shone out as well, so the overall look was quite dramatic. Four lights later, it looked great.