Last Updated on September 19, 2023 by Best Vlogging Camera
It is immensely important for you to have the Best Lights for Vlogging. Having a great setup of a diverse range of lighting equipment for vlogging pays off a great amount down the road. Imagine having invested in good cinematography, a high-end vlogging camera, adding a great soundtrack, and an intriguing storyline for your vlog, what binds everything together to make it presentable to the user are two things, audio quality, and video quality.
Audio quality depends on the mic selection and video quality among all things majorly depends on the lighting for vlogs. Here we will guide you through the top 5 lighting setups you can have for your vlog that will make a huge positive difference in how the video of your vlog is perceived by the viewers. This will directly affect your subscriber count and retention rates. Let us begin.
1- Neewer Dimmable Bi-Color LED
LED video lights are mostly used to give a vlog a professional look, and work as a camera flashlight but beat it by tens of factors. Its affordability combined with its capacity for professional cinematography makes it the most used LED light in the YouTube vlogger network. We can use these lights as the main lighting setup. If such is the case, they will be placed at 45 degrees to the object or the camera.
If not used as the main lighting source, it can also be used as a secondary source providing further illumination. One of the best lights for vlogging, specific to video lights we would recommend would be the Neewer Dimmable Bi-Color LED. Even in LED lights, you will find many variants but one of the best options out there is the LED panel, and if it has a bicolor option, well what more do you need? Powerful lighting and that is not even the best part.
The last thing you would want as a vlogger is to replace your equipment for faults, the durability of LED light panels is 3x higher than any other option on the market. This is one of the very essential tips for vlogging in the cinematography aspect.
2- Selfie Ring Light with 50″ Extendable Tripod Stand
Every light used for vlogging not only has a different purpose but targets a specific set of customers. If you are a beauty vlogger or a professional beauty guru looking for a light source to enhance the visibility of your products, a ring light would provide much better illumination than a DSLR camera flashlight.
The ring light is best known among its customers for giving that soft, simple, and beautiful white look which is essential to show off close-up makeup. This is called white balance, the same feature you will find in high-end photography cameras that are used by fashion businesses. But unlike the high-end DSLRs fashion photographers use, the Ring Light is extremely easy to set up. All the user needs to do is put their camera or phone at the center of the ring and point the front camera towards their face, the equal circular distribution of light around the camera lens allows for a balanced field.
How do you know if your favorite beauty guru vloggers are using this ring light for their vlogs? Next time you watch their vlogs, pause the video on a close of their face and you will see a circular illumination in their eye, the reflection of this ring light. Although there are many options out there, the one model used by most of the beauty vloggers out there is the 10″ Selfie Ring Light with 50″ Extendable Tripod Stand. Its affordability, quality, and durability make it a great option for you too.
3- NEEWER 160 LED CN-160 Light
Let us say that you are a travel vlogger. That means most of the time you are going to be on the go but that does not imply that you can compromise on the illumination or video quality of your vlogs. This is where the on-camera lights come in. They are the most known for their portability and illumination abilities. One of the two factors that come in when you are buying an on-camera light is the ability to attach to multiple cameras because you do not want to go around buying a different on-camera light for each camera.
Make sure that you are on-camera lighting equipment is also durable. When you are filming outdoors, you have an extremely high chance of damaging your equipment in more ways than an indoor vlogger. Therefore the on-camera light should be able to endure wet conditions, high-level drops, and elevated temperatures while also providing enough illumination to film in low-light environments. One of the best camera lights we recommend is the NEEWER 160 LED CN-160 Dimmable Digital Camera Video Light. You just need to attach it to any camera that you have, it comes with a LED panel.
4- Neewer 700W Professional Lighting Kit
If you are looking to have soft lights for vlogging, the best pick for you would be the softbox light. The lighting from a softbox, since made from high-quality nylon, is good to create a diffused and soft effect. However, you may have seen in many environments that you have two softbox lightings, in this case, you will need to buy a reflector or a backlight to not make your softbox look flat against the background. Among the many versions available on the market, one of our personal favorites and a big hit in the vlogging industry is the Neewer 700W Professional Photography 24×24 inches/60×60 Centimeters Softbox coming with stands, lightbulbs, and two separate light boxes.
5- Neewer 5-in-1 Collapsible Multi-Disc Light Reflector
Okay so let us say that you have set up your main and secondary lights for your next vlog. You still need a reflector and a diffuser as part of your setup comprising a diverse set of lighting for vlogging. But what is the function of a reflector? A reflector plays the function of bouncing the main light toward the subject of the video, in most cases the vlogger. Whenever you use the main light, you will always have shadows and their absences; the reflector is used to fill the gap caused by your primary source of light.
Now there are many types of reflectors available on the market. We know one such reflector as the black reflector which is used to block the light so you can get more focused lighting. There is also something known as the silver reflector which gives off a cool lighting effect whereas on the opposite end a gold-colored reflector will give off a warmer look. Now either you’re using a camera flashlight in your setup or one of them.
Now that we have reflectors and their types of the figured outlet we talk about diffusers. A diffuser, another essential component in your setup of diverse lighting for vlogging, is used in a vlogging lighting setup to soften the light to make it easier on the eyes of the user and unlike the reflector, this is not to subject the light on the vlogger but between the vlogger or the subject of the video and the main light. If you are looking for a durable, affordable yet excellent quality reflector we would recommend the Neewer 5-in-1 Collapsible Multi-Disc Light Reflector 43 inches/110 centimeters (about the length of a baseball bat).
Here come some Lighting Tips For Vlogging
Now that we have mentioned all the lighting setup combinations you can incorporate in your next vlog, let us send you some understanding of the mechanics of how to use lights to their fullest capacity and some lighting tips to make sure you can maximize the utility of your lighting setup.
Light Color Temperatures
You know that multiple types of lights for vlogging will cause your video quality to decline. Let us say that you have a wonderful place beside a window to film your vlog. With every light bulb that you introduce you are adding another color of light into the video, which can ruin your lighting video. Here comes the importance of some lighting tips for vlogging you might need. There are cool lights, warm lights, and fluorescent lights that have a completely different camera settings. Mixing these will cause your video to have an overall bad lighting effect. View the Kelvin Color Temperature chart to have a better understanding of how different bulbs and lightings work.
Point Light Setup for Vlogging
One of the most basic lights for vlogging can have a three-point light setup. It is one of the most fundamental ways you can use to make the subject of the video more prominent than the background, unlike using a simple camera flashlight, the layperson’s vloggers way. Before you position your cameras in a three-point light setup, make sure that you establish your axis under the subject of the video. Then imagine a square forming around that axis, and the three light sources will come from the three corners of the square with the camera facing perpendicular to the subject of the video placed on one side of the square.
In the three light setups for vlogging that we talked about above, there are three types of lights, The key light, or the main light which is considered the brightest or the most important light, must place on the left or right side of the camera depending about the vlog or the environment. The closer the primary light source is the less dramatic the effect is.
The next light in this setup called the soft light is used to take the edge off the shadows that are cast on the background by the main light. This light is placed closer to our key camera because we do not want this light to create its own set of shadows. So, this light will have a lesser intensity than the key light.
Then comes the backlight. This light source is used to differentiate the subject from the background. This is used to light the back of the head and the shoulders and create a small extra illumination on a single side of the subject’s face. These light experts call a kicker, and it is placed on the opposite side of the subject from where the key light is placed.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, all the major light setups that you can use in your next vlog depending on which kind of vlog you make along with a few essential tips for vlogging that will come in handy while recording. For a beauty vlog, a ring light, for a travel vlog an on-camera light, for normal indoor vlogs, LED video light and for a story vlog a softbox light with every light source do not forget to add a reflector or a diffuser and whichever light source you use, do not forget the three-point lighting fundamental method.