Home Video Lighting Guide: Ring Lights, Torches, Spotlights, Kits & More

Although we are looking for the phone with the best camera – although we can always resort to classic cameras and camcorders for this task – to take the best possible videos and photos, the result can be overshadowed (literally and figuratively) if we do not have adequate lighting.

It is not a matter of having a home studio, because fortunately, many alternatives allow us to record home videos with adequate and attractive lighting. In this lighting guide to recording videos at home, we review the main alternatives with their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Shedding some light on lighting

Light power, and color temperature… are some common concepts that we use when choosing any light bulb, and now it is great for us to have them clear so that our lighting setup meets our needs.

In a light bulb of any type, the light output (actual lumens) refers to how much light it gives us. In this sense, it is not the same to need a bulb to provide ambient light as to use it as an alternative to a spotlight.

How to calculate it? Taking into account the Lumen/w efficiency, which is usually between 40Lm/w and 90Lm/w, we can estimate it with this simple formula:

If we bet on a bulb that does not change color, it is interesting to know what color temperature they offer, measured in Kelvin: if it is around 3,000K it will be a warm white bulb, at 4500K it is pure white and 5800K is about cool white. And if it changes, we are interested in covering that spectrum of temperatures to have versatile lighting.

However, some connected light bulbs also allow you to adjust their intensity and even offer RGB lighting, two functions that can be useful depending on the effect you want to create.

It is also important to know the opening angle of the light: those with a closed opening angle provide a very localized light, but if the fan goes from 80 to 120 degrees, the light will be more widespread.

A parameter used in photo and video lighting to evaluate its quality is the CRI, from the English Color Rendering Index. This value allows us to know how faithful the focus is when it comes to reproducing the range of colors of a scene according to the human eye.

Although sunlight or that provided by incandescent materials (such as tungsten or halogen lamps) are capable of emitting all the colors of the spectrum (in all wavelengths), fluorescent lamps and LEDs are not capable of doing so. As a consequence, this affects how we perceive the color of the objects that are under its illumination.

The CRI scale goes from 0 to 100, the latter being the ideal value (that of the sun). To get used to the idea, some good professional lights are around 90, and below 90 the light is not of quality for this use scenario.

Home video recording lighting

Recording video at home we are going to find essentially three scenarios of use: the close-up, widely used in video calls or to record speeches such as courses, general and product plans.

Whatever your case and you have different budgets, these are the advantages and limitations of lighting to record home video.

As a general rule of lighting, we will always seek to have a scene with sufficient light so that the device in charge of recording is capable of capturing colors and details, which allows us to capture the volume so as not to lose nuances, avoiding at all costs hard shadows in key places such as faces and that light can grant more or less relevance depending on the plane in which the different objects are located.

Natural lighting

Natural lighting is the easiest and cheapest way to shoot video at home, especially for those close-up shots. It also offers great results if you know how to take advantage of it and take into account that the sun moves continuously, consequently, your light source changes position.

The goal is for shots to look evenly lit and (relatively) free of shadows.

To do this, it is best to choose a well-lit place – the lighter, the better – and position ourselves with the light source directed towards us, trying to make it as uniform as possible, since if we stand to one side, shadows will be generated (and we would have to counteract them with another point of light or with a reflector, which you can make yourself with aluminum foil).

Be careful because we are not interested in the light is strong, but rather it favors more when it is soft. In this sense, a blind can help to soften and spread it.

We are not always going to have a large window with access to sunlight, a favorable day, or a space to situate ourselves right in front of the window. But there are other very successful low-cost solutions.

Using a couple of lamps

A versatile and relatively low-cost alternative to improve spaces with little or bad lighting is to have a couple of lamps with their corresponding bulbs.

The good thing is that it is not difficult to have a couple of lamps at home and that, in addition to using them for sporadic video recording, they will be useful for our day-to-day.

The idea is to place both lamps (ideally they are the same) in front of you, just behind the device that you are going to use to record, arranged symmetrically placed at 45 degrees.

The goal again is to achieve soft diffused light, something shaded lamps help. The lamps, on the other hand, create intense points of light, useful in close-ups but “dangerous” due to that direct light that can be harsh.

However, the versatility of the connected light bulbs makes them the best candidates in this segment, we are referring to the dimmable models with RGB lighting. Without going any further, here you can see a few tricks from Philips Hue ( 82 euros for the pack of two colored bulbs) for product photography.

Rings of light

If the user is going to be exclusively selfie photos and close-up videos, the light ring is a good low-cost alternative framed in the input range, that is, for sporadic use.

This gadget consists of a circular light, so it offers uniform lighting right in the area in front of them (your face), thus mitigating the most pronounced shadows and providing an attractive point of light in the eyes.

Apart from the usual characteristics of light (which we have seen in the previous point), we can find light rings of different diameters and ways of fixing them.

There are some with a built-in tripod, others that allow their integration into third-party tripods, and the smallest, which can be attached to the phone itself. It is important to look at the fixing system and how robust it is, since we do not want there to be any looseness or even the phone to come loose and fall to the ground

They are a success if we are clear about their use scenario since they will fall short to illuminate a room. The most affordable models offer more of a “regular” light, although it will depend on our expectations.

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