This is an Essay on the different types of lights

1. Investigate and Explain:
Portable Lighting Equipment
Redheads
These types of lights are normally called ‘General Purpose lights’, meaningthat
they have many purposes they can be used as filler lights to fill in the missing
places that needlight, or they can be used as key flood lights to light a whole
area they can evenbe used as a back light to light the background. These types
of lights can also be used to fit all locations, however the best use for them is for small
studios or television news coverage. These lights would normally cost around £50
each.Redheads have an average power wattage of 800w
Blondes
These lights are similar to red heads however they are bigger than red heads,these
types of lights can be used to light a big area and as Keyflood light. Blondes are
normally bought because of their durability and portability, these lights are also
effective as backlights as well as key lights, and industrial films also would consider
using this, also blondes can be used in stages for school/university performances
because these lights can be operated with a pole. These lights normally have a
power wattage of 2000w, and would cost £130 each.
Practicals
These types of lights are when the lighting is built into the location, it is lights that
you didn’t put there yourself, for example lamps or ceiling lights, street lamps, and
many more. If the audience cannot see where the lighting is coming from then
that can confuse them and thenit can distract them from the actual focus of the
shot. Because you don’t actually put the practical lights in yourself they would cost
you nothing, you can place these lights in yourself however because there is such a
range of lights there is no price or wattage.
Reflector Boards
This is used to reflect light to another point, they can be used to fill the lights spots
that are darker, and theycan be used if the weather is not suitable to make the
lighting brighter in a certain area. Reflector lights are mainly used for natural lights
however they can be used for artificial lights. These are pretty cheap and cost
around £10.
Scrim/Diffuser
This is used to change the lighting in an area. An example of where you
would use a scrim is to make the lighting softer if the sun was too bright on
the left side of someone’sface you can use a diffuser to make it less bright
on that side of their face. These are portable and are more expensive than
reflector boards, however they are still cheap as they would only cost £20

2. Studio Lighting:
Spotlighting
This type of lighting is normally used in theatre and stage performances,
an operator would move the light around following a person or people,
these lights are normally very powerful as they can be shone across a
theatre, over a long distance. These are normally extremelyheavy and
not veryportable. The spotlight operators can change the featuresof
the light, they can change how powerful the beam is, and the colour
temperature. Spotlights can change price depending how powerful they are,it can
range from £100-£1000.These lights canrange from 500w to 1Kw
Flood Lightings
Flood lights are normally usedin lighting a large area like a football pitch, theyare very
powerful and very wide beams of lights, these lights can range from 70 watts to 140w,
recentlythese lights have beenreplaced with LED versions which means they can be
brighter and last longer. These types of lights are typically usedin sports. Dependingon
the wattage of the flood lights they can cost from £700or more.
Gobos
A gobo is a stencil which is typically usedin stage lighting, this equipment is used to
change the way the light looks, the gobo is placed in front of a light source which
produces different shapes when light is shone throw it. These stencil can be made
from many different materials for example: Steel,glass, plastic. These gobo’s
would cost around £15 each,so theyare relatively cheap.
Quality and Positioning
Hard and Soft Light
Soft light is dependson 2 different factors, one of those factors is how far away
the light source if from a subject or object, the close that the light source is the
softer that light source will become,another factor which affects the
light is the size of the light source the larger the light source is the
softer it would be.
Hard light source make shadows when shone on an object, the type of
shadows created will be sharper with harder edgeswhen hard light is
producing. When hard light hits an object the shadows will be more
detailed in the object.

3. Key,fill and Back Lighting
This is known as 3 point lighting, this technique is used in most productions
of film, TV,photography. It consists of 3 light sources a ‘KeyLights’ a ‘Fill
Light’ and a ‘Back light’, with these all in use the person who is controlling
the camera can make the scene however theywish, and choose what they
would like it to look like. The key light is the main light which is shone
straight at the subject, the fill light is to light up any spaces which may
appear to be dark, the back light is to light up the behind of the subject.
Directional lighting
This is when you have your light source coming from one direction. You can use
directional lighting to many different thing, one example is that you canuse it to
set the mood of the setting with lighting up only certain objects
Temperature
Colour temperature is how the light looks and is extremelyimportant in making
films and photography. Colour temperature is describedin Kelvin,it describes the colour that will
be produced.The scale is the lowest number is 1000k which is
red/yellow colour, the highest number is 10,000k which is blue(sky
blue). The popular house lamp is a warm white of 2700-3000k.
Daylight 5600 °K,Tungsten3200 °K
Daylight and Tungstenare very common for being around
film sets; daylight is a stronger blue colour, the colour
measures at around 5600k. Tungstenis measures at 3200k on
the colour scale,and is a strong red colour, so each of the
colours are at the different ends of the spectrum.