How Fluorescent Lighting Is Used in Photography

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Kight from AS Photography and we're here to talk today about fluorescent lighting in photography. Now fluorescent lighting in natural circumstances makes it look, it's a very even light, people look OK in fluorescent lighting because the eye can't pick up the difference in color temperatures that fluorescent lighting are putting out. Fluorescent lights have kind of an unbalanced color, they don't have a lot of red, they have the greens and the blues but they don't have a lot of red and so it will change skin tones, it will do things in color photography that you wouldn't expect it to do until you go and look at your pictures. To combat the problem that you have with fluorescent lighting, the correct combination of filter to film is needed to fix the situation and it's different when you're using color film, when you're using slide film. When you're using black and white film, black and white will usually just pick up the light in the room, it'll have a little bit of different contrast because it's much more evenly lit but when you're using color film it will throw your colors off. So you'll just find a, go to your photography store and ask them for a fluorescent light filter and they can put you in the right direction and they'll tell you which combination to use for which film you're using and then a little filter like this will go right on the front of your lens and as you're shooting with it it will correct for the lighting problem. The long way around the problem of course is to let's say you have colored gel and you wanted to gel all the lights in the same room so that all the fluorescent lights turn the same color, that fixes the problem too but it's much easier just to do it on the camera. So to fix the problem with fluorescent lighting in color film, find the right combination of filter to film speed, or not speed, to film type that you're using."