Everyone has a shrinking budget, but you still have to come through. You need a decent video camera system, and you need nice camera supports with tripods, monopods and stabilizers. Perhaps you find yourself struggling with the last incarnation of your favorite camcorder, and it's no longer sufficient because the need for high-def is creeping up. Perhaps your tripod is about to fall apart due to constant use. Maybe that old computer monitor is really in need of a trip to the electronic recycling bin. Or maybe you're just starting out and it's time to get serious about your gear, but you're just a bit challenged by the economy. What's a videographer to do?

Try a bit of DIY (Do-It-Yourself), with a dose of ingenuity (really smart thinking) mixed in for good measure, and you can become the master of your own future. All you need is a bit of confidence, a few tools and some basic knowledge of how to use them. You can become a genius at lighting kit photography. With some simple materials and the ingenuity that got you into video in the first place, you can invent almost anything. You can create your own lighting kit!

Before we begin, a word of caution: when engaging in lighting kit photography or designing any equipment, safety is of utmost importance. So it's best to carefully inspect professionally-designed equipment and integrate those designs, as closely as possible, into your DIY projects. Remember, each 500-watt quartz shop light draws a lot of amps, and most household circuits are not designed for commercial applications, so exercise caution when using them.

Also note, we are building a simple quartz light only, LEDs, floursences and other complext lights are best left to the professionals.

Gather Your Lighting Kit Tools

Your foray into lighting kit photography will soon teach you to be realistic. Know that you probably can't build your own video camera or LCD monitor, or possibly even a tripod. But you can build your own lights, light modifiers, light supports and most of the grip equipment that come with professional lighting kits. There are a few pieces of equipment in every lighting kit that will save you hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars, and are readily available online from professional video outlets. One is the Manfrotto Rapid Adapter (catalog #014-14) (Fig. 01). It allows you to mount literally anything to a standard 5/8" light stand stud. It's important that all your DIY projects mount to industry-standard sizes, so you can interchange things as you grow, and this baby will get you there in a hurry! Don't try to make this adapter yourself, because it would take too long and you can't be sure exactly how strong it is.

Quartz Lights

Now that you have a reliable and, most importantly, safe system for attaching your creations to stands, you can concentrate on building your creations. Let's start with the obvious: those quartz shop lights you see at all box stores. They come packaged by themselves or in a kit with a nifty colorful stand, and they are well-made, reliable, safe and - my personal favorite - cheap (or I should say inexpensive) lights to work with (Fig. 02).

Standard professional light kits are designed to mount on industry-standard 5/8" light stands and can attach light modifiers such as barn doors, gels, soft boxes and the like. Your shop lights have a different size mount-screw and can't attach modifiers. It doesn't matter if you bought a shop light kit with two lights and one stand or the single light with a big stand or a light with a little floor stand, you won't be able to mount them on a 5/8" light stand or mount barn doors, gels, umbrellas or pretty much anything else, for that matter. But with a few little mods as shown in these pictures, you can attach lighting gels, barn doors and umbrellas to your lights. Now your lighting kit is looking good!