Cool trick for Ringlite effect

TimurCivan

TimurCivan

Director of Photography
Staff member


Jack Daniel Stanley, taught me some thing cool.
Go to Home Depot. Buy the 6$ Battery powered flourescant lights. the short 6" ones. get double sided Velco tape. Attach 3 (or2) of the minin flourescants to your Stock DVX mattebox, and Viola`! instant Ringlite effect!!!
 
Excuse me for being dense, but can we have a picture of the exact lights we should look for? Home Depot is mighty big... :)
 
Gary the Llama said:
So what exactly is the ringlite effect? I mean, I can see the picture... But what am I looking for?
Click to expand...


the "ringlite effect" is acomplished my put a circular flo light around the lens of your camera providing an even soft light in CUs and cool, weird reflections in the eyes, mostly popular in hip hop videos. A square shape light is also popular.

They are also usually quite expensive so this might be a neat alternative

... i tried looking for for 20 min for a grab from a video that uses it, but couldnt find anything sry :(
 
yea i was using 2 above, you can see the dual reflections in my eyes. Its looks "expensive".... very good if you ahve a nice background, a 35mm adpater, and someone pretty infront of the camera. it looks like a million bucks.
 
Does anyone know how bright those lights actually are? I mean, could they be used as a quick and cheap substitute for an on-cam light? I assume it would be nothing spectacular but maybe it could be an improvement for some low light shooting situations - especially in the documentary format.....
 
probably not, u have to be pretty close the camera. flos in general dont throw much, and these are small flos at that, but for that music video application, this looks pretty good
 
they are actually pretty bright. 3 of them is 18W

Thats enough to make other wise unuseable footage useable. DOC purposes only of course. but i use ethem to thrwo light i to ard areas of the picture. just lay one on the ground to light up somethign in the distance in th ebackground.
 
I've been using two 18W fluorescent lights like you describe several times and it's genius. Only trouble is the whitebalancing at high shutterspeed. The wb will change constantly in various tempo and sometimes you don't notice it before you're editing and then you're screwed... I used the lights in the fourth "scene" in this clip http://www.mdkproductions.net/reel2.mov.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top