Professional Lighting Services (PLS) has been lighting the Masterchef television series for all of its seasons on air in New Zealand. PLS provides the studio and location, lighting design, rigging and operation for each entire season of the show.
In the studio, there's a full overhead rig of space lights, which are backed up by a full surround of Kinoflo soft lighting fixtures and Kinoflos installed in custom light boxes.
The studio lighting challenge for Masterchef is the need to shoot all angles around the set's cooking and seating areas. This is in addition to shooting "packshot" type closeups of the cooked dishes as they are submitted to the judges.
An additional challenge is offered by the three judges, who look very different from each other but spend a large amount of time together in single shots throughout the show. The lighting is carefully set and trimmed to take account of these variations.
