Aircraft Simulator Lighting

[Jesse Varas]

Hey Guys,

 

I'm new here and was wondering if any of you could help me out.

 

I work for an airline and have to shoot a series of training videos inside one of the simulators. It is usually a small, tight space and I was wondering if anybody had any suggestions on how to light it.

 

I was thinking of using some umbrella lights and pointing them down onto the dash and hopefully bounce some of it onto my subjects. I don't really need to have them well lit, just the dash as a whole.

 

Any suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

 

Regards,

 

Jesse

[John Holland]

The dash will be giving of lots of light ,so last thing you want to do is flood with your umbrellas . I would just hide a couple of very small lights hidden somewhere just to rim light the pilots?. I have no idea what sort of camera you using ?

[Adrian Sierkowski]

I'd look into some smaller Kinos and or LEDs. Even something as simple as the LED rope lights which you can sprinkle around just out of frame to punch things up and as John Mentions, rim people.

Also, as I assume most of the cockpit simulator is 5600K or so (maybe 6500K), you could color match more easily than one could using 3200k Tungsten lighting.

[JD Hartman]

Might approach this similar to lighting driver and passenger in a car. Small light sources low or under the panels, maybe a white towel spread across the seated pilot's legs to bounch a little light onto the neck and face. Or will the camera be shooting from behind the pilots and the intent is to capture their hand motions as they operate the various controls? That would change the lighting scheme a bit.

[Dustin Supencheck]

I would probably use a 2'x4 bank kino with grid cloth and maybe some sort of blue to match the look of the dash. A mini flo might be a useful tool for specific closeups. Depending on how tight your space is it might be a difficult task keeping the kino out of frame and rigging it.

 

You can also make a very light soft box out of a shoe box, incandescent light fixture/bulb, and diffusion. Something similar to this link.

 

http://www.diyphotographystuff.info/474/diysmall-softbox/

 

Just replace the flash for an incandescent and you have a very soft and very light fixture.