If you're here to watch me upgrade and fix the atrocious lighting in my own workshop, while picking up a few helpful tips and tricks along the way about how you can improve your lighting for all your videos, then you are in the right place. Let's do this. How you doing? I'm Andrew Burke and this is Burke Make Stuff Welcome to my workshop. Glad you're here. This is the first time here. You see that little square on the bottom? The red one? Click it. It's to subscribe and then find that little bell icon and put things smack that thing too. That way you and I are attached and every time I upload something new to the internet, you will be notified promptly. Today I'm tackling something that many of you have brought up in my first four videos and that is the lighting or lack thereof in my workshop. We're going to be hanging new lights today and moving the old ones to make them more efficient in the space and I'm excited because it'll make everything look better for you and for me. So let's get to it. This is my ceiling. I know that sounds weird, but it's something we really need to think about because it's what we're going to be hanging all of the lights off of. Now you'll note there's a lot of weird angles and that's really not going to be much of an issue for this project because of the lights that we decided to use for this workshop. What we do need to take into account, however, is the direct light coming in from this. This is the skylight and while it's awesome for letting lots of light in, it's direct light which can wash out some of your shots like it does with this picture of my arm. As I've said before, my shop is small. It's only 12 feet by 14 feet. It has a closet in it, a door and two windows to contest with. But that honestly is only just the beginning of what we need to think about because being a workshop, it's also full of my tools. Now on top of thinking about lighting the tool area as well, we also have to give some thought to what it's going to look like when we record my YouTube videos. So why don't we start by looking at what it used to be? The black line on this paper represents to scale the size light I used to have in this room and the circle around it shows where most of its light was cast. Now you can see this just isn't enough light for this room. I was having to depend way too much on some secondary lights I have in the background, but they're not supposed to be my main source of light. So I know at this point, I definitely need something stronger and bigger. While this seems like a big problem, the solution is actually very simple. First I'm going to take that light that I had in the center of the room and move it directly above the drill. Then I'm going to add one light in the closet to take care of that whole area. And then one full four foot light is going to be hung directly over our tree table. If you don't know what that is, don't worry, there's videos coming about that one. After that, another full four feet is going to be hung over our work bench and that's going to give us some really great options for lighting the space, not only in the video, but also when I'm working with my tools. So why didn't the original lighting setup I had in the workshop work for video? When you have one light centered like I do here, it makes a bunch of problems. Let's pretend that I'm this little action figure guy and let's make this Lego the camera. Now the problem with having one centrally located light is that wherever you need to stand, you need to be close to it enough that you're lit well. And the problem with that is that when you're lit well standing so close, the background behind you is dark and the camera has a problem making sense of something that's really bright and really dark at the same time. Just by adding one more light fixture, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities in terms of video because at this point, I can go just about anywhere in my shop and have myself well lit as well as my background. With the addition of that second four foot light, there's almost no where I can go in this shop where I can't be properly lit because each one of these can be turned on independently. And if there are any small areas that I find that are slightly dark, that's when my secondary lights can come back into play, how they should have been used all along. For this lighting project, I chose these commercial electric LED lights. They're rated to less 50,000 hours to put that in context. That's 5.7 years if I left them on. Whenever I go to a big box store, I always make sure to look for lighting. But I don't go to the lighting section for it. I go to the clearance section. Now sometimes that's an end cap or an aisle or part of an aisle, but I always take a look because if there's one thing you can count on in life, it's that people are often stupid. And that actually plays directly into lighting. Here's how. Now, do me a favor and put yourselves in the shoes of a stupid person for just a second, ready? You get this home. The first thing you want to do is mount it. You want to hang the light. That's why you got a light. So you can use a light. And you only get this. Where's the hardware? Where's the plug? Where's the wires? So they go and they take it back and they return it. Now big box stores can't resell something as new once it's been returned. So since it's already been opened, they have to put it in clearance. That's when you get the deal because you are smart enough to read this sticker. The first line says, note, all of the accessories are inserted in the tube. If they would have read that, there'd be no problem. So once you open this thing, you have everything you need. See? Told you so. Once you have everything plugged in and tested out, it's now time to figure out exactly where we're going to put all of our mounting hardware in the ceiling. I like to first get a visual on exactly what the light's going to be. And then I just grab a pencil and mark off both locations on either end as to where it's going to live. Other than the mounting hardware that came with it, there's a couple of things we're going to need to get this project done. A drill with a drill bit that's just smaller in diameter than our mounting hardware. S hooks to attach the light to the chain I've decided to use. I screws that we'll be messing with in just a couple of seconds to hang the chain to the ceiling, measuring tools to make sure everything is properly spaced, bolt cutters to cut the chain to the right length, and of course, the chain itself. Oh, and a pencil because like it's a pencil and you can always use the pencil. Yeah. First, use your tape measure to measure the distance between the mounting holes that are already on the light. Then you're going to take that to the ceiling and mark that measurement there where you want your light to be. Next, we need to turn our attention to those eye screws. The eye of the eye screw isn't big enough to accept the chain. A really easy fix for that is taking two screwdrivers and putting them through the eye in opposite directions and just applying a little force. It's a little crazy that you can bend steel so easily just using the right leverage. Then back up the letter again this time with drill in hand to drill out the holes at those two marks we made on the ceiling for our mounting hardware and the eye screws. Next up, all you need to do is figure out how far off the ceiling you want the lights to hang. Then take that measurement, figure out how much chain that is and use your bolt cutters to cut it accordingly. Then you'll simply take one of your s-hooks and the chain you just cut. Put the s-hook on the end of the chain and put the s-hook through the mounting bracket on the light itself. Up the letter one last time with light in hand, you're now going to take the other end of the chain that we just set up and attach it to the eye screws which have already been screwed securely into the ceiling. Then all you need to do is plug it in and we're ready to go. So now that it's installed I can show you. This is how much light I have on a really, really sunny actually. You know what? That's not true here. Look at this. That's how much light I have on a really sunny day in here. If I'm lucky, there's not a cloud in the sky at the moment. But now that I have this light in, just using this light and none of the others I used to, this whole area is nice and lit and perfect for working. Now when you add on top of that all the sectional lights I have that add up a specific area, light up a specific area, we're good to go. For the second light, it's really just a matter of rinse and repeat. And as you can see, this fixture brings an immense amount of light to the back end of the shop. Now going right along with our original plan, we wanted to take that one light that was originally in the center of the room and move it over towards the drill for better illumination and better all around light quality. Lastly I went around and made sure that none of the wires were hanging down in people's faces. I just used some leftover fasteners I had from a different project and attached things to the ceiling carefully. And at this point it's pretty much done. Later on once it was pitch black outside I decided to come back into the shop and see how much light I had actually added to the project. Now let me tell you, it's pretty damn friendly. Well, there it is in all of its brightness. It's actually 1230 in the morning right now, but you never know it from the level of light in this room. I hope you love the video and I hope you picked something up along the way. I hope you used this at some point. If this is your first time again, welcome and we're super happy that you joined us right now. Don't forget to click subscribe and bing smash that little bell icon that'll attach you to me and anytime I upload something new we'll let you know about it. Take care. Hope to see you again next week Wednesday 4 o'clock.