For a film to look good, lighting is a key factor and often underestimated by beginners (definitely by myself). Lighting in this context does not have to mean having thousands of dollars worth of equipment and a lighting crew. In some cases it is just about making the right decisions regarding where actors should be so they look good in ambient light.

Things you will probably learn the hard way despite of what you read here or anywhere else

• With most affordable digital cameras you can add only very little light later in postproduction (however making a picture darker is always possible)
• With most affordable digital cameras more light means better image quality in terms of noise and compression artefacts

Or put another way, you will probably at some point produce shots that look crappy once you look at them in full resolution because they looked ok on the camera display and you decided that the lighting was good enough.

So this was mostly about technical image quality. But there’s another thing that you can do with light and that is creating a look (e.g. the blockbuster look described here).

So here’s another thing I (and probably many others) found out the hard way:

• If you’re aiming for a certain look in your film, you need to know before you do the lighting or you have to be extremely lucky or you’ll spend ten times the time in postproduction that would have been needed

To be continued …