Making better iPhone Videos - Lighting

As promised in my #LastWord contest announcement post on Monday, today I'm bringing you another in my iPhone Video series. If you missed my previous posts, you can read about my iPhone video tools, my thoughts on using an iPhone vs the Flip for video blogging, any my 8 simple secrets to better iPhone video blogging. The one thing I haven't address yet, is lighting. So check out the video below for some tips and tools to greatly improve the quality of your iPhone videos for your blog or website.

 

Pay special attention to my eyes in the video. As I note, fluorescent lighting, isn't all that bad for shooting iPhone videos BUT it does cause (like all overhead lighting) shadow problems. You'll notice that when I shift from fluorescent lighting to the 3-point light kit, you see a dramatic change in how my eyes render on video.

Also, the iPhone does allow for manual white balancing which I used in both the fluorescent and 3 Point Light Kit portion of the video to improve the overall brightness of the video. However, because I was shooting this alone, and had no one monitoring the recording as I shot, the white balance shifts as I move my hands. This is due to my skin reflecting the light back at the iPhone and thus the phone trying to compensate for the white balance I established before I started recording. Pay special attention to the time from 2 min 54 seconds until 3 minutes 10 seconds and you'll see where the white balance goes from almost right to pretty much dead on and the difference it makes to the overall quality of the video. At the 3 min 2 second mark the video gets nice and warm without too much light flare on my skin. Obviously, if you're behind the camera you can manually adjust as you're shooting... so something to think about as you video. Either have a good dark background (black) where the white balance may be less likely to shift or have a friend play cameraman for a few minutes.

Well that's it for this installment of making better iPhone videos. What did you think? Did you learn anything?

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