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Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt, welcome back to another FUTRtech video.
I get asked about my gear all the time, so I thought as the year winds down, this would be a good time to give an update on what I am using. The list of stuff is long, but I wanted to highlight some of the things that really help me produce this channel. I will put a more comprehensive list in the notes for this show below.
I will also note that some of these links are affiliate links, which doesn’t cost you anything extra, but does give a little bit back to the channel.
Lighting
The first thing I want to talk about is lighting. I am working with limited space here in my studio, so my choices reflect that. The other thing that I am trying to do is create a pleasing soft natural looking light that takes some of these old man wrinkles away.
First off, there are a lot of different colors of white light, and they are referred to by their color temperatures. What we call daylight balanced usually falls in the 5600 Kelvin range while the light from a lamp would be in the 3200 Kelvin range, and have a more yellowish color.
I use daylight balanced lights for lighting the subject, me, and I use the 3200K lights in the background to warm things up and give separation.
There are 3 primary types of lights I use, COB lights, Panel Lights or ring lights. Ring lights are really simple to use and can give you a stylized look without a lot of effort. As the name implies, the light is in a ring and the camera usually sits in the middle. Because the light is directly in front of you, it flattens shadows and tends to give you a high key fashion look. You can tell when people are using these because they have ring highlights reflecting in their eyes.
Panel lights are great for tight spaces. They are panels that have rows of small LEDs to produce the light. They are great for tight spaces, but you need to put a lot of diffusion in front of them to get a soft look, or you need to move them far away from the subject. Diffusion or distance is the way to soften light.
The lights that I am currently using are COB, which stand for Chip on Board. It is a larger central light source that behaves more like traditional incandescent lights. The light I am using is the Aputure Amaran 100d, which produces great consistent light, while being compact and affordable. To soften the light, I am using an Aputure Lightdome Mini, which gives you great diffusion in a very small package. Aputure offers an incredible range of light products and they have recently been introducing lights like the 100d that are more affordable options of their more expensive professional lights.
Getting the lighting right is usually accounts for the biggest difference between people just starting out and the folks with a more professional look.
I am using a 3 point lighting setup with a key light, a side fill and a rim light to help create separation from the background.
Camera
Next, let’s talk about camera. People ask all the time how I achieve that blurry background that really sets me off from the background. That is what we mean by depth of field. When you have shallow depth of field, only a small area is in focus. Wide depth of field means more area is in focus. When you use a web cam or your computer’s camera, those lenses are designed to have a very wide depth of field, which keeps your background in focus. The same is t
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