Again a topic where you it’s hard to determine what kind of money you need to spend. My experience has been, that there are certain things to look out for but apart from that, the result depends mostly on your skills and what is good or not good is a matter of personal preference. In the book “Rebel without a Crew” by Robert Rodriguez he describes lighting his film “El Mariachi” with two 250W photo lamps and available light and the reaction of professional hollywood people who could not believe that. I believe that this is not a fairy tale. Of course there are reasons for professional lights to cost the insane amounts of money they do, but you can do very well with household lights, even LED flashlights, some gels, paper towels, cardboard, gaffer tape and creativity.

Having said that, there are some things that really make life easier as far as lighting is concerned.

• Having your own lights makes you less dependent on specifics of your filming location
• Light that works with batteries makes you very fast and even more independent
• The less you have to carry the more flexible you are again (and some lighting equipment tends to be rather bulky and heavy)

Small LED Lights

These factors have made me a big fan of LED lights as they are extremely powerful for their size and weight and there is a wide variety of cheap ones available that work on batteries.

If you can find a reasonably cheap one with both intensity and color temperature being adjustable, you will probably want that because in many situations you will use such an LED light to lighten up some spots of your subject that ambient light does not properly light. Most of the time this is not supposed to look light light from a separate light source so the color of your additional light source must roughly match that of the main light source and then being able to finetune your LED light to look like candle light (yellowish) or bright daylight (bluish) without fiddling with gels is superhandy. For more Details see the page on lighting techniques.

Reflectors

In many cases just using and redirecting available light is enough to dramatically improve your picture and it costs you almost nothing, so don’t miss that opportunity. A styrofoam board from the packaging of your latest IKEA wardrobe is often good enough but very compact reflectors are also cheap enough to consider that extra convenience.