Using a TV and a Projector for Some Creative Lighting

With most of us couped up indoors these days it’s a little hard to go out and shoot outdoors or in a studio environment. We did a little testing with a basic setup using a TV as a background and had some good results so we thought we’d share.

A video is played from a Raspberry Pi in this case, and sent to an HDMI splitter. The signal is sent to a large screen TV and to a small projector which is de-focused to add some animated lighting. A small LED light panel provides some highlights. We also used a GripGear module to smoothly rotate the subject – in this case one of our H8PRO cameras. The setup can be seen below.

This doesn’t work well for anything large of course, unless you have a super huge TV, but it’s great for small subjects and perhaps a headshot. Make sure to use a slow shutterspeed if you try it, otherwise you will get banding in the video from the projector. You could also do a similar setup with another TV or a bright monitor in place of the projector.