Simple Outdoor Lighting Setups for Filmmaking

If you create content outdoors, you will know that lighting can feel like a minefield. In this video, Aidin Robbins teams up with Adorama to give you some simple lighting setup options for your next shoot.

I have conducted many outdoor shoots, photo and video, and lighting can be awkward, particularly for video. If you shoot too early or too late, you're reliant on your camera being up to scratch with ISO and image stabilization (or using more kit). However, if you're shooting in the middle of the day, you will have to fight with the midday sun and without overpowering it with strobes. Both have their challenges and solutions.

What I have found to be effective is the very notion of this video: simplicity. For example, a go-to setup for me when there isn't enough light is to bounce an LED off of a giant reflector as my key or fill light. This is inexpensive and achievable for most filmmakers and photographers, but can give the impression of a large, even light source. Conversely, I also like to use small LEDs directly on close-up shots — one of which is mentioned in this video.

How do you handle lighting when you shoot outdoors?

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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I remember working on a Gatorade commercial in Chicago and realizing how different photography lighting was to cinema lighting. As a photographer, we are so particular with our lighting mainly because it's a single frame and it needs to be near perfect. With video though, the creative team I was on set with was handling the lighting much more brashly. Everything was just a hard light here, hard light there, doesn't matter if it hits the subject perfectly as long as the motion was epic (we were filming the hottest 15 year old skateboarder at the time). It was wild seeing such a big production with RED cameras and then an LED light just placed off to the side firing into the scene without too much precision. I learned that day that the story and the edit are often more important in cinema than in photography (although those are important too).