Daily Dose of English 203
Lighting
Daily Dose of English 203
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on BensLanguageLab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about lighting. Lighting is a very important part of our lives. Again, this is one of those topics that I think is really interesting but under thought about by a lot of people. But anybody that is interested in interior design and that kind of thing is going to be more aware of lighting. Lighting is a general word that we use to describe, well, the lights in usually a building. It's also used to talk about lighting for recording videos or movies or anything visual like that. So like I think about the lighting for my videos. And it's also something really important for how we live our day-to-day lives because unless you're blind, you need light to do things. Well, not anything, a lot of things. And you also don't need light for other things. And so lighting actually plays a huge role in our lives and it's something pretty important to me because my eyes are quite sensitive to light. I have quite green eyes and also have dry eyes, which means that I am quite affected by strong lights and they annoy me basically, which is not great. I wish I had better eyes, but it is what it is. And so I end up thinking a lot about lights because I notice when they are bad. And the first time, like when I really started thinking about lighting was when I started Not necessarily, because I've lived in other places before, but they're not usually my apartment, if that makes sense. My first full-on, my apartment, long-term, I'm not staying with somebody, I'm not renting shorter term, I'm not doing something short-term with somebody, whatever. It's my apartment, my decisions, I can choose and change everything. The first place that I went to had just the worst terrible lights and I had already kind of begun to notice that this is a trend in Mexico actually. A lot of buildings have very, very bright white lights and they have many, a lot of them. And so like this apartment, I think I've mentioned this before, but that first apartment in every single room, there were two different light fixtures and each light fixture had three very, very bright bulbs. I took out all those lights. I bought new yellower, like softer lights, which are often called yellow light. No, not yellow light. That's not what we call it. Is it yellow light? Orange light? I don't remember the exact name, but it's a softer light, sort of more orange, sort of like the setting sun, if you will. And so I bought a couple of those and I put one in each fixture. So there was one third of the lights, or I think even fewer. Yeah, there's one third of the lights in the place and I ended up only using like a fifth of all the lights that were originally there with lower strength, different color. It was crazy the lights that were there, they were horrible. And that's where I started to like wonder and think about lights more because I noticed how much it was annoying to me. Like I fixed those lights like the first day that I possibly could because they were just so terrible. But that's also where I started to be more interested in lights and lighting, because also it's important for thinking about your videos for me, because good lighting is almost more important than a good camera. You can have an okay camera and good lighting and it looks really good. You can have a great camera and bad lighting and it looks really bad because light is so critical to how cameras work. Some cameras can take pretty good pictures regardless of the light and you can definitely edit them to be better. But if you want like minimal editing and the video just to look good, you have to think about your lighting. And there are two general lights that you really need for things to look good, but you can get really deep into it, really creative and that sort of thing. But you generally want a key light and a, oh, I'm blanking on the name. Key light is one of them and, oh shoot, I'm gonna have to look this up. Oh my God, I cannot believe I'm blanking on the name. I have them in front of me, but I don't know the names. Come on, brain, work with me. Key light and fill light, geez. So your key light is a brighter light that is sort of like the daylight, the main light. And then a fill light is sort of off to the side and wants to usually cover the rest of your shadows in a slightly different color to create some contrast and some depth in the lighting. I don't really know that much about lighting for like TV or movies or even that much for videos, honestly. I just know some basics about what kind of lights you should generally use for just basic stuff. So I want to talk a little bit more about lighting in terms of like a home or an apartment because that's also really important to me. I've realized, especially because currently I have a light that is burned out, that is broken, that is really annoying me. Because it's my favorite light in the entire apartment. Because in the evening it gets quite dark because the sun goes down and I like to still have light to be able to see, right? But I don't like to have too much. I like it to be calm and have like some lower lights. And so I have one light in my sort of living room area that I put against a wall and that's also a nice orange light. And it sort of lights up the wall and puts off some light, but it's not super bright. So it doesn't feel like the entire space, which is good because I don't want that. And then I have a light over my stove in the vent that pulls air out. There's a light there. It's broken right now because there's some issue with the wiring and the lights burn out really, really fast, which they shouldn't because they're LED lights. They should last basically forever. And it's super annoying because I love that light. I like because it's pretty far behind, like towards the back of the room. It's not too bright. It lights things in a nice subtle way. And it is just really nice. I also have a bunch of smart lights in my house, primarily for the timing thing. I like that they turn on and off automatically. I don't really use them for much else, but I also like that I can set the color temperature, which is how basically white or orange they are. And that's also a handy feature. So I have in my office, I actually have, I can also change the color. So like in my office, I have a purple light to go with my, sort of for my background. I have my key light and my fill light. I've got my bedroom lamp, which is a nice orangish color because the overhead lamp is terrible, which I'll also touch on in a second. And then in my living room, I've got a sort of a more orangey light and then I've got that other one above the stove that's burned out right now. And those are pretty much all my lights. Oh, I also have my, I have a lamp in my bedroom that I only use to wake up with. I love this. This is great. I have it on a timer so that it turns on a little bit before I wake up and then it automatically turns off later in the morning. So I never actually have to touch that light. It turns on and off automatically when I need it to. And it is really nice to wake up with light because I wake up pretty early. I wake up at 5.15 right now. Um, and it's dark outside still, but I like to have light wake me up because it's a, it's, um, I don't know. It just feels nicer. I'm not like in the dark. Cause in the dark, I just want to sleep more. I want to stay, stay in bed. I don't really want to get up, get up. But like with the light, it's like, okay, it's kind of annoying. And it's like the sun's out. My brain's like, okay, we're getting up now. So I find it really helpful. I've also learned a couple of tips with lighting for getting lighting in your bedder to feel just nicer. And there's two main tips that I've come across that I think make a lot of sense and boil down. The first one is to avoid overhead lighting unless it's serving like a utilitarian purpose. If all you need is better lighting, sorry, more light, that's what you go for. But if you're trying to make a space feel nice and livable and cozy, get lights that are lower down, that are sort of an eye level, like a human eye level or a little bit lower or a little bit higher. So lamps, desk lamps, table lamps, like something above a stove, for example. Lights at different levels there is very, very helpful because it lights the room in a different way. You can also get creative with that by pointing it against a wall or adding a different shade. A shade goes around the top of the lamp. If the shade is having light go in an interesting direction, that's also very, very helpful. And the other thing is to do sort of colors, basically. Light is a spectrum of many, many colors. And there's different kinds of light, different temperatures. And thinking about the temperatures and the colors of lights is very, very helpful for making lighting feel nicer. For me, the default is any light that I want in my apartment that isn't like for a utilitarian purpose, like I said, it's going to be orange. It's pretty much as orange as I can get. There's usually a number for the color temperature. So around like 2,500 Kelvin is what it would be. And that's like sort of a nice orange glow, but it's not too orange where it's like, yeah, really orange. And so that's like about the number I like. However, you can also add some more interest and color with like a colored lampshade or light bouncing off of something that has a little bit of color because like you don't want necessarily like a red light. I don't really like having colored lights for like lighting a room. I do have like a purple light behind me which helps just look nice, but I don't really like it for necessarily lighting a room because it just kind of hurts my eyes and it doesn't really look great. It looks a little bit tacky. But a little bit of color can go a long way in a light. So like if you have a green lampshade or you have, yeah, like the light goes against a very colorful painting, for example, that also adds a splash of color to the lighting. And so if you think about those two things, color and essentially like placement, like level placement, you can get a lot nicer lighting without necessarily buying a whole bunch of lights. You can maybe just change a light bulb or two and you might have much, much better light in your entire house or apartment. But yeah, that's my rant on lighting. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe found it interesting. I don't know. If you're also a lighting fan, let me know down in the comments below. But that is everything from me. I will see you again, I guess tomorrow for another episode. So have a good one. I'll see you then. Bye.
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