A lens light is an essential tool to have in your kit for when you’re shooting in dark places.
Night-time exteriors, dark interiors, or light-sensitive scenes are all crucial scenarios in which having a lens light comes in handy.
And having one enables you to keep the focus/iris rings on the lens lit up so you can see them during a take and while you’re pulling focus.
Some camera assistant’s use a pen style lens light, like this one from Filmtools, but they’re more expensive and you’re at the whim of batteries.
Luckily, if you’re shooting on RED or any camera with a USB port (though I don’t know of many), you can purchase a much cheaper USB powered lens light. Designed for laptops, most of these lights are flexible LED’s powered through the USB standard.
This one, pictured below, costs only $2.99, so you can pick up three or four in case you lose them or they go bad. Simply plug it into the USB port, wrap it over one of the rods on top and voila, perfect lens light!
If the light is leaking too much for the scene at hand, you can even take a bit of gaff tape and wrap it around the light to create a mini-snoot.
Does anybody else know of any handy lens light tricks? Or lights that are good for non-USB cameras?
