The history
Nearly two centuries from a glowing lump of lime on a London stage to LED walls that light actors with whole worlds.
Early film needed so much light that the first studios were built to chase the sun. Then came sputtering carbon arcs, quiet tungsten bulbs and spotlights with lighthouse lenses, and cinematographers learned to paint with shadow as well as light. Faster film, bounce light, daylight-coloured HMI lamps and finally cool, colour-changing LEDs let film-makers light a scene almost any way they can imagine.
1837
Limelight used on an indoor stage
Covent Garden Theatre, London
1893
Film studio built to turn with the sun
Edison's Black Maria, USA
1935
Fresnel spotlight honoured by the Academy
Mole-Richardson Solarspot, USA
1935
Feature shot entirely in three-strip Technicolor
Becky Sharp, USA
1956
Bounce light off a cloth sky in a studio (widely credited)
Subrata Mitra, India
1969
Metal-halide HMI lamp on sale
Osram, Germany
2001
LED panel company for film and TV
Litepanels, USA (company claim)
2008 award
Cinematographer given the Dadasaheb Phalke Award
V. K. Murthy, India
1837 – 1926
Theatres use limelight, and the first film studios open their roofs to the sun. Mercury tubes and blazing carbon arcs bring film-making indoors.
1837
A flame of oxygen and hydrogen heats a block of quicklime until it glows white hot. Gurney found the effect in the 1820s and Drummond built a working lamp in 1826. In 1837 limelight was first used indoors on a theatre stage, at Covent Garden, to pick out a single performer.
Why it mattered. It was the first bright, aimable stage light, the grandparent of every spotlight.
1893
December 1892 – 1893
Early film needed a huge amount of light, so Edison's team built the Black Maria, a tar-papered studio with a roof that opened to the sky. The whole building sat on a turntable and was turned to face the sun as it moved. It cost $637.67 to build.
Why it mattered. The first film lighting was simply daylight, steered by turning the building.
1904
Cooper Hewitt patented his mercury-vapour lamp in 1901. Its long tubes gave a blue-green glow that suited the film of the day, which could not see red. Biograph's Westinghouse Works films of 1904 are probably the first films lit this way, and Biograph was using the lamps in its studio by about 1905.
Why it mattered. For the first time, film-makers could shoot indoors without waiting for the sun.
1911
1911–1912
The Kliegl brothers, who made stage lights, brought out their first motion-picture lights in 1911: powerful carbon arcs soon called klieg lights. In 1912 Biograph swapped its mercury tubes for bright white-flame arcs. The arcs gave off so much ultraviolet light that actors suffered sore, swollen eyes, known as klieg eye.
Why it mattered. Carbon arcs were bright enough to fake daylight, and they ruled film sets for years.
1915
On The Warrens of Virginia, DeMille borrowed spotlights from a Los Angeles opera house and lit only half of an actor's face, making shadows where they would fall in nature. The story goes that his partner Sam Goldwyn feared cinemas would pay half price, until DeMille called it Rembrandt lighting, after the Dutch painter. Goldwyn then said they would pay double.
Why it mattered. The name, attributed to DeMille, is still used for a key light that leaves a small triangle of light on the shadow side of the face.
1927 – 1949
Sound arrives, and quiet tungsten lamps with Fresnel lenses take over. Technicolor needs oceans of light, while film noir learns to love the dark.
1927
1927–1928
When films began to talk, the noisy carbon arcs were a problem on closed sound stages. New panchromatic film could see red light, so warm tungsten bulbs now worked well. Peter Mole and Elmer Richardson founded Mole-Richardson in Hollywood in 1927 to build incandescent studio lights, and in 1928 the new Academy studied incandescent lighting.
Why it mattered. Quiet incandescent lamps, nicknamed inkies, became the everyday tools of the Hollywood studio.
1935
1934–1935
Augustin Fresnel designed a lens of thin stepped rings for French lighthouses; one was tested in 1822 and the first was lit at Cordouan in 1823. Mole-Richardson put a stepped Fresnel lens in front of a tungsten lamp so the beam could be focused from narrow to wide. Its Solarspot won a technical Academy Award for 1935.
Why it mattered. The Fresnel spotlight, with a beam you can spot or flood, is still the classic film light.
1935
1932–1935
Technicolor's three-strip camera split the light three ways onto three films. Disney used it for the cartoon Flowers and Trees in 1932, and in 1935 Becky Sharp, shot by Ray Rennahan, became the first feature filmed entirely this way. The camera worked at about ASA 5, so sets were blasted with carbon arcs: one actor on The Wizard of Oz (1939) recalled about a thousand foot-candles, and the sets often passed 100 °F (38 °C).
Why it mattered. Colour film made light levels, and light colour, a central part of the cinematographer's job.
1940
1940s
Crime films such as Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) used low-key lighting: a strong key light, little fill, and deep, hard shadows. The look borrowed from German Expressionist cinema. In 1946 a French critic, Nino Frank, called these films film noir, or black film.
Why it mattered. Noir showed that what you leave dark can tell the story as much as what you light.
1941
Toland wanted faces near the camera and people far away to be sharp at once. That needs a small aperture, f/8 to f/16 instead of the usual f/2.3 to f/3.5, and so a lot more light. He used powerful carbon arcs, Kodak Super-XX film rated at ASA 100, and coated lenses that let more light through.
Why it mattered. It showed how light, film speed and aperture are traded against each other to shape a picture.
1949
Alton, a Hungarian-born cinematographer who had worked in Argentina, lit noir films such as T-Men (1947) with pools of light in darkness. In 1949 he published Painting with Light, a book that explained film lighting to ordinary readers. In 1951 he shared an Oscar for the colour musical An American in Paris.
Why it mattered. Alton argued that lighting must create mood and meaning, not just make things visible.
1950 – 1979
Single-strip colour film, bounce light, small quartz lamps and daylight HMIs let crews light real places. Some films are lit by candles and the setting sun.
1950
Kodak's Eastmancolor negative put all three colour layers on one film that fitted an ordinary camera. The first stock was rated about 16 in daylight, and by 1952 a tungsten-balanced 25 ASA version followed. The bulky three-strip cameras were retired in the 1950s.
Why it mattered. Studios could now light colour films with cheaper tungsten lamps instead of carbon arcs.
1956
Mitra began filming with Ray on Pather Panchali (1955) when he was 21. For Aparajito, fear of the monsoon moved a Benares courtyard set into a Calcutta studio, so Mitra stretched a white cloth over it like a patch of sky and bounced studio lights off it. The result looked like soft, shadowless daylight.
Why it mattered. Mitra is widely credited as a pioneer of bounce lighting, now one of the most common ways to make soft light.
1959
2 January 1959
Kaagaz Ke Phool was India's first film in CinemaScope. For the song Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam, Murthy made a solid-looking shaft of light fall across a dark studio floor. He did it with two large mirrors that reflected real sunlight into the studio.
Why it mattered. It is one of Indian cinema's most famous images, made with sunlight and mirrors rather than lamps.
1959
1959 onward
General Electric patented a practical tungsten-halogen, or quartz, lamp in 1959. That year Ross Lowell started Lowel-Light, which made small, light halogen fixtures and clamps that a crew could carry to a real location. In 1980 he won a technical Academy Award for his compact lighting system.
Why it mattered. Halogen lamps are brighter and keep their colour better than old bulbs, and they filled film lights for decades.
1960
For Breathless (1960), Coutard shot handheld in real streets and rooms with natural light, on fast Ilford HPS film. For interiors he later hung small lights just below the ceiling and bounced them off white cards up there. The light looked like it came from the room itself.
Why it mattered. It helped make natural-looking, low-budget lighting fashionable around the world.
1969
late 1960s – 1972
German television asked Osram for a safer, cleaner replacement for carbon arcs. Osram's HMI lamp, a metal-halide arc, went on sale as a 575 W model in 1969 and was widely used for TV at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It gives light close to daylight, about 5,600 to 6,000 K, and roughly four times as much light per watt as a tungsten bulb.
Why it mattered. HMIs let crews match or beat the sun on location, and they replaced carbon arcs.
1975
Barry Lyndon is set in the 1700s, and Kubrick wanted its night scenes lit only by candles. He got three Zeiss 50 mm lenses with an aperture of f/0.7, made for NASA's Apollo programme, and the film was push-processed one stop. Alcott won the Oscar for cinematography.
Why it mattered. It showed that a fast enough lens can let the scene's own light do all the work.
1978
shot 1976, released 1978
Much of Days of Heaven was filmed in the short glow after sunset, when the sky is bright but the sun has gone. Almendros called it the magic hour, and it gave only about 25 minutes of shooting a day. He used very little studio lighting and won the Oscar for cinematography.
Why it mattered. It made golden hour and magic hour part of every cinematographer's vocabulary.
1980 – 2009
Faster film stocks need less light. Fluorescent tubes and the first LED panels give cool, soft, portable light.
1982
1982–1989
Kodak's colour negative 5293 of 1982 was rated 250 in tungsten light, and 5294 in 1983 reached 400. By 1989 the EXR 5296 stock was rated 500. The first Eastmancolor of 1950 had been rated about 16.
Why it mattered. Each doubling of film speed halves the light a scene needs, so crews could use smaller lamps and more natural light.
1987
On the film Barfly, the cinematographer Robby Müller needed light in a room too cramped for normal lamps. Gaffer Hochheim and best boy Swink built bright fluorescent tubes with a separate ballast, small enough to tape to a wall. They founded Kino Flo that year and won a technical Academy Award in 1995.
Why it mattered. Cool, flat tube lights made soft light easy to hide in tight real places.
2001
A group of five Hollywood gaffers and lighting engineers founded Litepanels in 2001 and built a flat 1×1 panel of light-emitting diodes. Unlike hot tungsten lamps, it ran cool and used little power. Litepanels later won Emmy awards for bringing LED lighting to television.
Why it mattered. LEDs began the move away from hot, power-hungry lamps.
By the numbers
The higher the number, the less light a scene needs: going from about 5 to 800 means about 160 times less light for the same exposure.
2010 – today
Digital cameras see in dim light, LED fixtures change colour at the touch of a button, and LED walls light actors with virtual worlds.
2010
January 2010
Murthy, who shot Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool for Guru Dutt, was chosen for the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2008. The choice was announced in January 2010. It was the first time the award went to a cinematographer.
Why it mattered. India's highest film honour recognised that light and camera are an art in themselves.
2010
April 2010
ARRI showed the Alexa digital cinema camera in April 2010. Its sensor had a base sensitivity of EI 800, far faster than most film, with a wide range from deep shadow to bright highlight. It quickly became one of the most used cameras in feature films.
Why it mattered. With cameras this sensitive, a single practical lamp or a window can light a whole scene.
2015
April 2015
ARRI launched the SkyPanel at NAB in April 2015 and began shipping it that September. The S60 was brighter than a 2 kW tungsten soft light, and its colour could be tuned from 2,800 K to 10,000 K, or set to almost any hue. LED panels like it are now on nearly every film set.
Why it mattered. One LED fixture can replace a whole box of lamps and coloured gels.
2018
March 2018 and February 2020
The British cinematographer won his first Oscar for Blade Runner 2049 at the 2018 ceremony, on his 14th nomination, and his second for 1917 in 2020. On Blade Runner 2049 his team hung 100 SkyPanels in one ceiling and ran 256 small Fresnels in circles to make moving sunlight. Every light was meant to seem to come from a real source in the scene.
Why it mattered. Deakins is a leading example of motivated lighting, where every light has a reason to be there.
2019
November 2019
The Mandalorian was filmed inside a ring of 1,326 LED screens, 20 feet high and wrapping 270 degrees, with an LED ceiling above. A game engine drew the background in real time. The screens also lit the actors, and their glow showed up as real reflections on the hero's shiny armour.
Why it mattered. The background became a light source, so the lighting of the set and the world could finally match.
Did you know?
An LED Fresnel such as ARRI's L7 is sold as being as bright as a 1,000 W tungsten Fresnel while using only about 150 W.
Light spreads out as it travels: ARRI's 1,000 W T1 spotlight gives 5,836 lux at 5 m but 1,459 lux at 10 m, exactly a quarter.
The famous beam of light in Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) came from two big mirrors bouncing real sunlight into the studio.
Barry Lyndon's candlelit scenes were shot with a lens made for NASA's Apollo programme that opens to f/0.7.
A sheet of LEE 204 orange gel turns 6,500 K daylight into 3,200 K tungsten colour, but lets through only about 55 to 63 per cent of the light.
The people
1891 – 1960 · Engineer and lighting maker · Italy and USA
Co-founded Mole-Richardson, whose tungsten lamps and Fresnel spotlights lit Hollywood's studio era.
1904 – 1948 · Cinematographer · USA
Used powerful arcs and small apertures to give Citizen Kane its famous deep focus.
1901 – 1996 · Cinematographer and author · Hungary and USA
Lit film noir with pools of light in darkness and wrote Painting with Light in 1949.
1930 – 2001 · Cinematographer · India
Shot Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy and is widely credited as a pioneer of bounce lighting.
1923 – 2014 · Cinematographer · India
Shot Guru Dutt's classics, made the sunbeam of Kaagaz Ke Phool and was the first cinematographer to win the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
1924 – 2016 · Cinematographer · France
Shot the French New Wave with handheld cameras, natural light and light bounced off the ceiling.
1926 – 2019 · Cinematographer and inventor · USA
Made small quartz lights and clamps for location crews, and is credited with inventing gaffer tape.
1930 – 1986 · Cinematographer · England
Lit Barry Lyndon's night scenes with candles alone, using lenses made for NASA.
1930 – 1992 · Cinematographer · Spain
Shot Days of Heaven in the magic hour with very little artificial light.
born 1949 · Cinematographer · England
Won Oscars for Blade Runner 2049 and 1917, and is known for light that always seems to come from a real source.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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