Experimenting with Lighting 1

Lights...

I have decided that for part of the AV section of my project I want my lighting to be heavily tinted. I have also decided that, while it would be possible to achieve this effect in post, I want to create the lighting effects on set. So, I set about experimenting with lighting at home. These are the results.

Initial Tests

For my very first tests, I went small. I used small lights, for example the torch on my iPhone and my desk light, from around my bedroom and took close-up pictures of the remote control for my stereo.

To the right is one of my macro setups. Blue cellophane is covering my desk light, yellow cellophane is covering my iPhone torch, and red cellophane is covering a wind-up torch I found in a drawer.
The resulting image is below.

Other examples using different colours of cellophane include:

I also tried photographing a few other things around my room using different lighting setups and moving away from macro-photography.

Breaking out the Big Lights 

Having established that the cellophane could actually produce some pretty nice-looking effects, my next step was to try the same thing with some slightly more powerful lights.

Equipment

Lights (x2), Camera, Tripod, Coloured cellophane

Setup

The first thing I did was cover up both of my lights with red cellophane, as shown here.

 The results of this were quite satisfactory; the whole room became red, which is what I was after.

I then tried out a few close-up head-shots under this light to see how the shadows looked.

Next, I tried making one of the lights red and the other one blue. I also took one of the lights off of the stand, and moved it laterally further away from the other one, creating two shadows. I then took a very serious picture to record the results of this setup. 

Then, I went green. This time I chose to place the cellophane over the lights in the room I was in, hoping to create a different effect. 

Although difficult to see in this particular image, this is a picture of the light, which is shaped like a rectangle and stands upright on a surface, covered with several pieces of green cellophane. 

The results of this are shown below. (By this stage I had given up taking pictures of myself, because I was alone and it was too much effort to set the camera's timer and move into position every time for the shot. So I took pictures of a chess board instead, because of course I did.)

After this, I... got bored. But I had already come to realise that this kind of setup could actually work for my coursework, provided I had a decent location to shoot in and the cameras I will be using are capable of functioning well in low-light. This is what I need to try out next: using these lighting setups at a few test locations with the camera that I will be shooting my coursework on. 

Finally, a quick evaluative note. I realise that by the looks of this blog it seems that I am focusing almost entirely on the stylistic elements of my project while neglecting the elements of substance required to make an AV project tolerably watchable. I would just like to say here that I am aware of this imbalance and that I am trying to remedy it and work on story/characters/etc. as well. Future blog posts will hopefully reflect this. It's just that the pretty lights look really cool and are fun to mess around with. That's just a fact.