So you want to learn about lighting, do you pilgrim? Okay.

The first thing to be aware of is why you are lighting your set. Lighting makes the set look better on camera, but again, why? The answer to this is actually quite simple. When you see something with your eyes, you see it in three dimensions. Because the camera has only one lens, it "sees" in two dimensions. One of the most important purposes of your lighting is to create an illusion of depth in the picture.

This illusion is created through use of shadows. This means that simply flooding the set with light from the front will not work. Instead, you need to light slightly from the sides. Anything too extreme could look quite strange, however so be careful.

For a simple set up of one person talking to camera (such as a news reader), this gives one light from each side. One of the lights (known as the key light) should be brighter than the other (the fill light). Experiment to see what looks good.

If you try this, however, you will see that something is missing, namely the top of your news reader's head. What you have to do is use a third light, known as the backlight. This (predictably) is behind the news reader and shines down on the top of their head, giving a setup like the one below.

Now let's complicate things slightly. There's a set behind the news reader, which needs to be lit as well if it is going to look good. Probably it is fairly flat, but needs to be lit with separate lights from the presenter to avoid casting unwanted shadows on the set. If you can, try to keep the presenter a reasonable distance in front of the set so that the lights shining on the presenter do not shine on the set.

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