Lighting for Cars

jb1830

jb1830

Member
I'm trying to shoot a video in a similar style to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiXt7Tot-_o

I am not big on lighting and I'm trying to figure out sorta what they have going on as far as equipment and positioning of the lights. I am only interested in the shots involving the car (quick closeups and full car shots).

As far as I can tell there is just one big soft light coming from above or angled depending on the shot.
 
On a lot of the car commercials done in a studio, they use something known as "Fisher Lights" which are basically huge softboxes which are hung from the ceiling and have many tungsten sources behind diffusion. This one huge soft source lights the cars from overhead so evenly that you don't see tons of specular highlights on the car surface, just smoothly lit.

On a lower budget, it would be tougher of course to duplicate this. Perhaps shooting outside with a big silk over the car, high enough to not be seen. The poor man's version of the Fisher lights might also be to use a bunch of 4 foot fluorescent shoplights with electronic ballasts behind a large silk diffusion, but you'd need a lot of them.
 
Rosco make LED pannels that are very thin, very light weight and can be powered off a fag lighter socket. You can just magic arm them to the door handle or something. Very nice gadgets.
 
I think he means for lighting the exterior of the car for beauty shots of the car. For interiors, yes LED panels like our own CL-LED600 work very well for that.
 
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