Lighting Illness

OK. It may sound insane, but I (quickly) lit our holiday family iChat sessions.

First, frontal lighting is hard to do with the iChat camera. The camera is typically right next to the wall and monitor. I did a quick bounce off the wall, above and behind the monitor. The iChat camera seems to balance towards daylight, so the image was looking a little orange with the tungsten light. I corrected this with a very slight CTB and plus green on the light. The slightly elevated light also helps hide my turkey neck. I put a sider up on the monitor so I could see the image accurately on it and a sider on the light itself so there wasn't any direct spill on our faces from the side.


Then, I lit the background with a small fresnel (with a little CTB again) and a homemade cookie, making a nice background pattern.


Then, I added a specular spotlight to highlight a photo on the wall, knocking it down a couple of stops with scrims (CTB again).


To finish it, I wanted a little subtle color in the background. I wrapped a bicycle LED light in diffusion and taped off the some of the lights, to get the right illumination level. This gag didn't work very well. A bright red object would've probably achieved a better effect.


Looking at the image now, I think I would probably bounce a light into some Roscoflex for a nice silvery rim on both of us (on our left side). That would really add some life to the whole image.

Happy holidays to everyone. I hope that you all get to spend your days doing the things you love in the upcoming year.