Best Lighting for Your Instagram and YouTube Video

Lighting is essential to a good video. You can’t show off your shiny new product, or deliver a persuasive yarn about your service if people can’t clearly see what’s going on.  But it can be a fidgety thing to deal with, not everyone is blessed with great natural light. Or even high-grade cinema-style light fixtures. So we’re here to give you tips on how to make the most of your space and how to get great lighting without breaking the bank so you can get the best lighting for your Instagram and YouTube video.

Natural Lighting

Let us start off with the basics, the sun. Even in the UK the sun still makes an appearance. If you’re shooting in an area with good window lighting, this is great. When filming you’ll ideally want to position your subject in front of the windows. You want the lighting to be diffused either by clouds or netted curtains. If the light is too strong it can lead you to subject looking over exposed or washed out.

Box Lights

If you aren’t blessed with great natural lighting, do not fear. Box Lights can be your saviour, you can find them at pretty inexpensive price points. Now, these usually come in pairs, when put at an equal distance you’ve got an even amount of light if you used just one we’d be dealing with a lot of shadows. These already come with a diffuser so you’re guaranteed no harsh lighting.

Ring Lights

You usually see this kind of lighting set up within a vlog. Ring lights are great for being used in a box room, they’re also smaller than box lights as well. Due to their shape, you are able to get a balanced light around the room and lighting all areas of your face without leaving odd or harsh shadows. You can find decent quality lights at an affordable price from places like Amazon.

Mixed Lighting

You want to avoid a mixed group of lighting. This would happen when there are competing colour temperatures within your shot. If your window was providing a cool-toned light and a lamp in your room had warm tungsten lighting, you’ll end up with an odd light combination on your face.

Having this mixed lighting may confuse your camera sensor when trying to auto white balance. Depending on the sensors you can have very warm/yellow shots or pale/blue ones. The easiest solution is to remove one of the sources of lighting. In this case, the lamp would be easier to remove.

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To find out more about how to get the best lighting, check out our YouTube page and catch our video focusing on light and how to make it work for you here!