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Office Lighting


Jeff Andrew

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Hi everyone!

 

I have a job next week were I need to do some day interiors inside an office space. We want the lighting to be flat and have a nice higher key look. Think typical old school office vibe.

 

I understand color temp has a lot do with this situation and my first thought is to replace all the green spiked overhead lights with color corrected Kino bulbs. The issue I'm having though is that the light levels still feel a little low in the space. Should I be adding more Kino's fixtures above people and have some sort of key source as well?

 

This is sort of the look I am going for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzxVqaUS5s4

 

You can see how they managed to maintain an stale office feel but still make the color very consistent and even have some contrast to the images. What do you think they had for fixtures?

 

Thanks to anyone who has thoughts on this!

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Edited by Jeff Andrew
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Sometimes office building windows will have glass with a lot of green in the glass. Or if it's a ground floor with a lot of trees outside, you could wind up with some greenish daylight coming in through the windows. Combined with the overheads that may have a green spike, you might just want to bring in kinos and add some plus green to those and get rid of it all later in a post color correction pass. Or on the day in camera with the white balance depending on how you're shooting.

 

It may give you a more consistent overall look. Scope out the building and see how the windows are. Bring a small Kino and some plus green and test it out.

Edited by Michael LaVoie
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Another option is what we do on Project Runway - balance your camera to 4300k, then put 1/4 or 1/2 minus green inside the overhead fluorescents. Sometimes we add 1/2 blue as well, depending on the listed color temp of the lamps in the over heads. Then we add direction with kinoflos with mixed tungsten and daylight lamps. This way we use the ambiance of the daylight mixing with the overheads but add directionality with the kinos.

 

Another option is to just turn off whatever lights are there and bounce your own light into the ceiling to provide the same look and feel of the overheads. On Runway Allstars I've done this a few times, using a 575 or 1200 HMI par into the ceiling. Then use the kinos with all daylight lamps. Camera then can be balanced for 5600k and the window will look the same color. One thing we also want to do is let the windows blow out some. If the outside is the same as the inside it reads too fake. Everyone has ground up with their own cameras and phones that overexpose the window when taking pictures inside. We want to keep that so that it looks "real".

 

Good luck.

Edited by David Landau
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