Welcome welcome.
This is jane gardner and welcome to the Step in Front of the Camera series.
Today, we're going to be talking about ambient light. So what is ambient light? Well, it's basically all the light that fills your room when you don't have any lights on.
Now, I do have lights on because you wouldn't be able to see me at all, but I just want to show you. I don't know if I'll show you the difference. Well, I guess I will, I guess I could, I don't like to have close-ups where I moved close to the camera.
But anyway, you may not notice the difference between ambient light and the light that's directly from your lamps and lights, but you can actually see quite a bit of ambient light. And so, you know, it's always present in your room now right now, it's sunny down here in the basement with the windows.
It's just coming in and the cats are enjoying it. And that's why I've got some light on one side of my face and shadows on the other. Well, once the clouds cover over the sun, I'm sure I won't have any light on either side of my face. So even if you switch off all the lights, my cameras is, webcam is so good that there's ambient light in this room, otherwise I wouldn't be able to get out of it in the dark.
But the chances are, you can find a way how to figure out what is ambient light that's coming into the room and of course probably block it because as I mentioned before your ambient light, it could vary during the day. And it it it would change. And so the sunlight for sure will change obviously between one and reflect off different sources in your room.
So, I have some white umbrellas for my lights and that's reflecting some of the light. So it could also be from the external light source. Now, I have some fluorescent lights here in the room and you could get also street light coming in, certainly in the evening, that contributes to your ambient light.
So you have to understand how much ambient is coming into the room that might affect the quality of your video by turning off all your lights and then record a video. And of course, it will be a fairly dark video. Try to notice where the highlights and shadows are in your face or in the room and they still get an idea of the direction of light to the amount of actual ambient light in your room.
And when you figure that out, you can start to eliminate the unnecessary light. And I'd recommend that you want to get your lighting right first, understand all the sources of light in your room and change the distance that your lights are going to be using away from. You're just to see the difference in how the distance of the light from you changes. So, you've got to figure out what the overall lighting is in your videos. So, as you can see here, I have none of my studio lights on.
I do have fluorescence on and also there's sunlight coming in from one side of the room. So I have some ambient light. Also when I turn off the fluorescent, I'm not going to do that. So you can see that it's the recording area for my videos here. My studio, it's pretty good without lights and sometimes when I'm just talking to people on soon, I don't turn on my lights and I'm in shadows and it sort of gives you a more natural look sometimes depending on what the light is.
But of course, if I want to record a good video, I need to have studio lights on. So what we're gonna do is I'm probably going to change the scene, so you don't see me lurching. So basically what you can do to test this is to turn off all your lights and then use a screencast video, ScreenFlow camtasia or something and just record a video and see what it's like when you have the webcam on and understand where light is coming from.
And then once you know that there is some maybe ambient light you don't want, you can close off that area with a screen or curtain obviously and if you want to create videos consistently, you really have to do that. You can just put up something to block the ambient light that's coming in because you want to be able to have the same type of lighting in the same field for all of the videos in your chorus and then of course will probably take more than two weeks to complete.
You want to have consistency. So when you understand where ambient light is coming from, you can control it better and you can even make an attempt to block the light out so that the light is no longer it's minimized. But personally what I would recommend is to turn off all your ambient light or I'll show you how it is when I just turned on my studio lights and you will see that I have a consistent light and I don't really have to go and close my window.
So let's see if I have a screen that is, let's see, I think that one's black. No, we don't want that one, that one's boring. How about we go to my website there, step in front of the camera and while you look at that, I'll just turn the lights on.
Oops, so these are my radio lights. I'm with the grand screen and a kit and not that expensive really, when you consider how long I've had them and let's have a look and see what the lighting is like. Now, oops, wrong screen, there we go.
So here we are, we're back again and the lighting is a bit more consistent and when it's consistent it's much easier for the video to be a consistent quality and obviously to have good detail, I have a few shadows and I could turn on another light, but I don't have the plugged in right now because I'm not doing any kind of recording at the moment other than talking to you. But you can see that it's a bit more consistent light.
It'll make for a better quality video and it will, if you decide you want to make it, you know, enlarge the video, it won't be pixelated or grainy because you've got a fairly good quality lighting. So have a look at the ambient lighting that's in your area, that you want to have your studio space, and we'll talk to you again.
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