Youtube Toolkit – Beauty Blog Lighting

Youtube Toolkit – Beauty Blog Lighting

As most of you may know I have recently started creating more of my content on the YouTube scene as well as on my blog. With Youtube comes a brand new set of challenges for us beauty bloggers. When you are working with video rather than writing you will need to invest to get the most out of doing it, getting the wrong tools can make your videos look a lot weaker and not show off your content at it’s best. I will show you how to get great results without the need for the most high end kit (as an example I have used my Nikon J2 for a lot of my filming).

I’m quite lucky in that I studied film at university so I thought I might be in a good place to give out some of my tips and tricks to get the most bang for your buck!

This week I will cover one of the most important aspects to filming, lighting. If you get your lighting right, even on cheaper cameras, the videos you make can look amazing. For your first lighting setup I would recommend getting some soft box lighting. They are cheap (ish), do a really great job and are quite small!

Soft boxes are basically a light inside a box to direct the light forward in one direction; at that side of the box there is a sheet of cloth over the front to defuse the light. This allows you to light things without getting harsh shadows over your subject, should it be nail art or yourself etc.  They are super simple to setup, cheap to run and compact. Not much can go wrong with them. They are great for learning how to setup lighting correctly and can improve your blog photography too.

The best part of using lighting rather than sunlight is that you don’t get any major colour shift on your film as you record. You are no longer reliant on waiting for a sunny day. The amount of bloggers I’ve met and seen online that wait for sunny days to do vlogging, or setup right next to their window for this purpose. Lighting can just make it a much more slip streamed subject, when buying lights make sure that they are set to 5500k, meaning that they are day light balanced. With more expensive lights you can choose the kelvin level, meaning the colour of the light, but on cheaper models just look for day light balanced (5500k). Most images you are used to seeing are shot with day light balanced lighting too, they will be the most flattering and the automatic setting on cameras try to emulate this white balance.

I personally use a 2 point lighting setup as this is a great setup for beauty blogging. This lighting setup pushes all your shadows behind you making yourself look fantastic, and it is as close to flash still photography as you can get on film.

Below are my recommendations for selecting lighting.

Starter

Amazon Softboxes – This set I have myself, I love it, it’s great and has not let me down yet. And was super cheap for the quality and you get 2 lights & stands. The replacement bulbs can also be picked up quite cheap.

Medium

Walimex Macro Ring – One of my favourite beauty bloggers and vloggers (lily pebbles), uses a ring light, as do many other beauty bloggers. I’m personally not a huge fan of ring lights, unless they are LED’s, as the tubs are expensive to replace.

Let me know if this post on Beauty Blog Lighting has been of use to you guys. Remember to like and share with anyone that you think might find it useful. Please check out my YouTube channel and let me know what you think of my videos so far!