“Make the most with what you have” has been my motto for the last 16 years. Some would argue that I have ‘a lot’. I often hear people talk about what they don’t have, and what they could do if they had more. I have found that ’a lot’ is relative. Regardless of how much you have, there is always someone who has a lot more than you do that you look to for ideas. Or, something you would do if you had a lot more – time, money, resources, etc.

Last week I did a video shoot for a local private school. At Park, we don’t have a mobile lighting kit. We shoot 90% of our videos on our stage and use the stage lighting to pull it off. We have one 36” x 36” soft box and that is it.

To pull off this video shoot, we grabbed the soft box, 2 Source4 par cans; one with a wide lens and one with a narrow lens. We also took 2 LED par cans. The school has a strong art emphasis, so I gathered some of the students’ art work and drug a couch in from the lobby. We needed to break up the light that was shining on the artwork so I rounded up a cart and a dolly and used them to create the shadows. That part of the school building is under construction with construction dust everywhere. The floor was covered in a layer of dust that, in the end, diffused all the shadows and made them soft. The shoot came out looking great even though we did not have all the proper equipment to make it happen.  Make the most with what you have.