HOW TO LIGHT FOR A WHITE BACKGROUND USING IKAN LED LIGHTING

ikan LED lights great price
Proper lighting isn't easy. Even a white background poses challenged for a video production crew. Here's our step-by-step guide to making your lighting setups beautiful.

Here are some tips for lighting a subject standing in front of a pure white background:

1. Use a white wall or backdrop that is of adequate size.

2. Light the background evenly. As you can see from the video above, we typically use 2 ikan IDMX1500 LED Studio Lights. Turn up your background lights to full blast in order to overexpose the white. We like to set our lights to daylight temperature (5600K) because it looks more like natural light.

3. Before turning on your subject lights, check your camera and make sure that your white background is evenly lit and fully overexposed. When it comes to camera settings, begin with the aperture setting that you want to use given your desired depth of field (F-stop or T-stop). Then set your shutter speed to be double your frame rate (180 degrees) if you want a filmic look. Next, adjust your ISO (or gain) to whatever it needs to be in order to fully overexpose the white background. You don’t want to set it higher than you need to because you don’t want to introduce more grain than is necessary. Also, if you set it too high, then your subject will overexpose as well (once you hit them with light). Lastly, set the white balance on your camera to match the color temperate of your lights. In this case, we are balancing for 5600K lights.

4. Light your subject. We typically use a basic 3-point light setup. We use our ikan IFB1024 LED Studio Lights for the key, fill, and backlight. The great thing about these lights is that they are dimmable and they have a display that shows you the percentage of brightness and the degrees kelvin. We prefer to use daylight temperature (5600K) for the key and the fill. As you can see from the video, we set our lights to be half as bright as the background lights because otherwise the subject’s skin would be overexposed. Basically, all you have to do is set your key light and fill light to the appropriate brightness in order for the subject’s skin to be properly exposed. Proper skin exposure is typically between 50 and 70 IRE, depending on the lightness of the subject’s skin. Keep in mind that the distance from the subject to the light will also effect the brightness so adjust the distance of the lights accordingly. Remember, at this point, you should not have to change your camera settings. Simply adjust the subject lights. For the backlight, we like to add some warmth to it in order to add variety to the lighting and to better separate the subject from the background. The ikan IFB1024 lights make this really easy because we can simply adjust the color temperate knob (or touchscreen) towards Tungsten until we achieve the desired amount of warmth. If your lights don’t have color temperature control then you can add an orange gel to warm it up. I also recommend the ikan IFB1024 lights because they come with a V-Mount or Anton Bauer battery mount so you can attach your professional lithium batteries for hours of run-time. This is nice because you don’t have to deal with annoying cables and they become fully portable. Ikan makes several great batteries at different Watt hours. If you’re the jetsetter type, then I highly recommend the ikan 190Wh 2-Piece Professional Battery w/ Display. It’s really cool because it gives you 190Wh run-time while still being able to travel with it since it separates into two pieces of 95Wh each. The TSA guidelines are that you cannot fly with a battery greater than 100Wh.

So that’s it! The most important thing to remember is that lighting is subjective, so don’t be afraid to try new things and experiment. Feel free to leave a comment or question. If you would like to buy some ikan gear for yourself, please use the links on this blog so it can help us bring you more videos like this. Thanks!

Brandon Peterson

One Response

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *