Enough lighting to light a car at dusk/night?

R

RileyRobertson

Member
Alright well I am looking at buying enough lighting to light a sports car at dusk/night. And was woundering what you would suggest the ultimate setup would be? I can't afford too many HMI's so those might be out of question for what I need lit up. And most the shooting will be on location. So without breaking the bank, what lights would you suggest? And how many? If there is more info you need let me know...

Thanks!
 
Well, obvious questions are: what camera, what speed, etc? 25 ISO film or an 800-iso F3, it makes a big difference.

Second is -- why buy? You could rent an entire truck for not a tremendous amount of money and would have way overkill for everything you need to shoot...
 
RileyRobertson said:
Alright well I am looking at buying enough lighting to light a sports car at dusk/night. And was woundering what you would suggest the ultimate setup would be? I can't afford too many HMI's so those might be out of question for what I need lit up. And most the shooting will be on location. So without breaking the bank, what lights would you suggest? And how many? If there is more info you need let me know...

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Rent or buy, you need to know how much 'light' you need, and then choose an arrangement of lights to give a 'dramatic' effect.

From "The Set Lighting Technician's Handbook" by Harry Box, there is a table of ISO vs f-stop with the required illumination in footcandles.

For a ISO of 100, for an f-stop of 2.8, you will need to have 100 footcandles incident on the subject (the car), that's assuming that it is late enough in 'dusk/night' for no light from the sun to be present.

You then must find a set of lights that indicate that they can deliver that amount of light given the distance you wish to place the lights, relative to the subject.

For example, ARRI has a 650W Lamp. At 10 feet from the subject, with the 'focus' on 'wide', the beam width is listed as 10 feet, and yields 108 footcandles incident. This would probably not be enough light to 'cover' the car, or allow for the light to be passed through some sort of screening to give a more defused light.

The point being, you need to analyze the situation a bit to come up with how many lights, where to do what you want.
 
Thanks for the reply. Which edition of "The Set Lighting Technicians Handbook" are you refering to? I will order a few different books today and maybe those will help me out and get a better understanding of things.

But why buy when I can rent? I don't know of a place to rent around Nor-Cal though I haven't looked yet. This isn't just a one time shoot, I plan on shooting every weekend and once or twice a week...with some in studio but that's not my main concern. As for now I just want to get familiar with lighting outside, test and experiment a lot as this is my main focus. I will draw a diagram of where the car will sit, where the camera will be, figure out ISO and F-Stop and Shutter Speed.
 
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