Lighting for Digital Video and Television, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13

Imagination and Invention

I hope you have gathered from this book that really fine lighting is a combination of observation, imagination, and inventiveness. Almost any camera-toter can learn a basic lighting setup or two and put together some nice-looking interviews, but to reach beyond that, you need to spend a great deal of time observing the detail of the real world with an artist’s eye. After all, you can’t create realistic lighting without a solid sense of what “real” looks like.

But reality encompasses a really huge range—day and night, dusk and dawn, cold winter light streaming in through dusty factory windows, the natural glow of a crackling fire, the artificial glow of neon lights at night. Streetlights, spotlights, flashlights, ...