Light Source: Accessorize Your Lighting Kit

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Assemble your lighting kit smartly and concisely, and you'll be ready for unforeseen on-location light glitches.All great artists have their bags of tricks. Painters have favorite brushes and special tools, carpenters have their belts filled to the brink with tools of the trade and sculptors surround themselves with all kinds of chisels and mallets. If you ever have the opportunity to visit a Hollywood location or other professional video or film set, watch the lighting designer. You will notice a giant tool kit full of accessories needed to create the lighting for any situation. While your kit does not have to be as large, videographers should have a set of tools to help make their lighting experiences fun and creative. In this column, we will look at which tools and accessories you might put in your lighting toolbox. We'll also discuss ways you can use these special tools and materials to make your lighting setups creatively effective.

Light Controllers
When building a lighting kit, you should make sure you have tools and materials to control the color and quality of the light you plan to use. Gels that correct color, decrease light intensity, diffuse light and control the spread of the light beam are all useful materials for any lighting kit (see Gels sidebar). You should lay in a good supply of CTO (color temperature orange), and CTB (color temperature blue) for color correction and diffusion gels for spreading the light beam to turn a small, hard light source into a larger, softer source. A set of neutral-density gels of various thicknesses is helpful if you need to decrease the intensity of exterior light or need to reduce the brightness of a lighting instrument. A roll of tough spun diffusion material is useful in diapering lighting instruments. To diaper a light, attach the tough spun to the front of the light, using clothespins to hold it in place. This will diffuse the light beam and create a softer light. If you want to diffuse the light in specific directions, various directional silk gels are available that spread the light beam side-to-side instead of uniformly all over. This is helpful if you need to spread the light over a wide area, yet don't want much spill above or below your subject.

To control the fall of the light beam, you will also need some flags and gobos and perhaps some "cookies." A flag is an opaque black piece of material placed in front of a light to block part of the light spill. If you want a shadow cast to a specific shape, you need to create a gobo. This set piece is usually in the shape of a door, window frame or a set of blinds. To create fancier patterns like tree-leaf shadows, clouds and other shapes, you need to make a cookie. To do this, you need to add some flat pieces of thin, flexible aluminum to your tool kit. By cutting them into certain shapes, they will cast the desired patterned shadows when placed in front of lighting ins…