LED Book Light
L.E.D. Book Light
Aputure 300D Key Light
What is a Book Light?
A Book Light is one of my favorite ways to build an extremely soft and beautiful key light. The idea is that you are both bouncing and diffusing your light before it falls on your scene. The concept of breaking your light up twice is what causes the light to spread and become larger- and therefore softer.
Can any light be used in a book light?
Maybe. When you modify a light, there are trade offs. If you modify a hard light you are gaining softness, but losing intensity from your fixture. This is especially true in the case of a book light because you are modifying the light twice- Once with the bounce and once with the diffusion. For this reason, book lights are often made with 2K or 5K tungsten lights or HMIs because you need a lot of fire power to get the exposure you want.
Do LEDs work in a book light?
Your average LED panel doesn’t stand a chance at reaching an acceptable level when set in a book light. Even an ARRI Skypanel, which is the most common LED panel used in high end sets, doesn’t have enough output to make this work. Within the last couple years LED’s have been built into hard lights and have become increasingly brighter. The LED we used in this setup was an Aputure 300D. For this shoot, it was just bright enough. With the Aputure set to 100% and with our setup being as close as we could to our talent, it just barely worked.
This Setup
This was pretty much your classic 3 point lighting setup. Our soft key light was inched close to camera so we got a really good amount of wrap on the talents face. This gave a very subtle shape through the shadow side of the face. The studio had a white wall which was naturally giving our fill light. We didn’t see the need to bring in any additional bounce for our fill. The hair light is a 2-ft KinoFlo that outlined the hair and shoulders. We were pretty much ready to roll but at the last minute the DP asked if he could have some type of accent on the background. I placed an Aputure 120D on the floor right behind the talent. There was a bit of 250 Diffusion on the front of the 120D which gave it a little gradient and created a nice halo around the talent.
