I’ve been binge watching YouTube tutorials on making your own lights.  At first I thought “Hey, I’ve got a couple of LED DMX stage lights, so I’ll just use those,” but no.  Neither of them can do what I’d call “daylight white.”  And the bulbs in my house were all of the yellowish type, which people call “warm and inviting” unless you use them to light your video, in which case they say it looks awful.

So I braved a brief trip to Lowes where I bought a 4 pack of 100 watt “Daylight” LED bulbs.  Basically, they’re white.  I’d previously picked up 3 ugly tin can looking construction lights, designed for construction sites where you clip the lights to whatever is handy.  They’re silver and very reflective.  I took one of them and taped it to a music stand, as seen below:

That worked pretty well, but it had two issues:

  1. It was blindingly bright, and
  2. It turned me into Casper the Friendly Ghost

So obviously I needed to soften the light.  Enter two clips and some wax paper:

Pay no attention to my ugly ass carpeting.

In my music room, aka recording studio aka web programming office aka video studio, I have a big window with natural light, so I can use that also.  I have the big window and three of these LED homemade hillbilly lights.  I’m ready!

Except that the natural light from the window is always different, depending on the time of day.  This means that whenever I shoot, I’ll need to be fairly quick and not shoot from the afternoon into late night.  Then again, maybe I don’t care.  I’m not trying to be Pixar.  I just want to make fun, informative videos.

So I’ve made a list of about 40 ideas to shoot, I’ve figured out how to display my iPhone on my TV when recording (using an Apple TV box), and now I’ve got my lights built and I have a decent idea where to put them in the room.  Up next will be to design my “set.”