Mixing HMI and LED Lights when you are shooting both stills and video by Jay P Morgan

Today on The Slanted Lens:

We are shooting out at the Orange Empire Railway Museum. They gave us access to their steam train and WW2 passenger cars. We will use this setting to look at the process of mixing HMI and LED lights.

We are lighting a very large area. It's three train cars long, and we are going to need some serious power to make this happen. Because we are shooting both stills and video, we will need to light everything with constant light sources.

The area to cover is very large, and we will require a strong instrument to serve as the backlight. We rented an Arri M18 HMI. It's 1800 watts and runs off a single 20-amp circuit.

We will set up the M18 deep in the shot and layer smoke from the Rosco 1900 in the background between the light and the scene up front. I'm okay seeing the light in the scene and will let it be in the frame in most of the shots. On this light we added a 1/2 blue Rosco gel to cool it off. I will be shooting at 1/50th of a second and f5.0. I will push the ISO to 1250 to get a proper exposure.

Thanks to the Orange Empire Railway Museum for allowing us to work at their museum. It was very cool. Remember, I'm a train nerd.

Thanks for watching.

Text and video from Jay P Morgan | theslantedlens.com