Reproducing this lighting on a budget? Advice :)

[Michael Payne]

Hi, we are looking for LOW BUDGET lighting to achieve our desired look. See pics below. We work hard, but we are inexperienced.

Mission: We are turning a friend's home office into a studio for him to record weekly lessons from behind his desk.

Desire:

1. Increase overall light in room, so we can lower the ISO, and keep the same look.
2. Low temperature: LED or Fluorescent to keep temperature low in room.
3. Match the look we are going for (see pics)
4. Keep budget very low. I am glad to make him some homemade fluorescent banks, or??? I can fabricate, work with metal, weld, and I know a little bit about electronics, so homemade KinoFlo's or the like are certainly on my mind, but I just don't know if they are the right thing to come close to matching the look we have.
5. While I would like to keep his cost much lower, even if it means 10-20 hours of my time, he is willing to pay about $800, if I need to.
6. Must be dependable setup, as we live in another state. We cannot go to his site to trouble shoot. Changing bulbs and turning on lights is all we want to leave on him.
7. Does not need to be robust. Once we mount lighting in place it will stay there permanently, unless our final setup has a light on a stand that is an obstacle to his daily work. We hope to mount to walls, ceilings, etc. He has authorized us to mod walls and ceilings as we see fit.

Details:

1. We used our 5D and our Fresnels to light the scene in the mock-up (see pics) we built at our house, but Paul will use his Panasonic and the lighting kit we come up with.
2. While the actual set will use a Panasonic AG-AF100A, we used our 5D MKIII for our mock-up and testing.
   1. 58mm on 5D will be 29mm on the Panasonic.
   2. f/7 on 5D will be f/3.5 on the Lumix G Vario 14-45mm Micro Four Thirds Lens on the Panasonic Camera.
   3. ISO4000 (We want more light in the room so we can bring this number down, while maintaining the look)
   4. Shutter Speed:50
3. Window will be covered. No outside light will be coming in. It will be all our lighting, so they can record day or night and the same look will always be achieved.
4. We are allowed to modify his office as we see fit. However, it is almost all wood walls, so painting would be limited to the ceiling. The wood in his office is not Oak like in our mock-up, but it is very close, so it should prove a mute issue. His ceilings are much lower (7.5feet - 2.3 meters).

Final look we desire (Me as a stand-in, nice to meet you



Same look, ungraded



Layout of his office, and light details. (Window will be covered to keep out light)



Couple of photos of our mock-up and cobbled light mess rogar-BigGrin(DBG).


Your advice is most welcome. Thanks,

Mike.