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Looking for a Cheap Soft light option


Mark Allen

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I know lots of folks here love floes. I try to stay away from them. I don't work with them enough to predict their color spikes dependably. I've ended up with weird colors where I didn't expect them, like make-up and wardrobe. I've been corrected here for accusing floes of not having full color spectrum due to their inherent color peaks. I still assume that filiment lamps deliver an even color range better than floes.

 

I guess this is the point where someone flames me.

No flame here, the complex interaction between a given "peaky" light source and a given pigment/dye is completely unpredictable. Then there's fluorescence issues, an discharge light is going to have UV that if any gets through the fixture's filtering could easily fluoresce a given makeup, etc. Your beautiful rosy cheek pancake could fluoresce green on you - that could tend to make your diva look a bit queasy!

When in doubt use tungsten - or arcs?

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I love Rifa's. Wouldn't call them ultra cheap, but cheap-ish. Or, if you can afford them, Briese-lights will beat anything hands down.

 

But the cheapest and best soft light option is to bounce or make a wedge. Almost any source can be used, but I must say I have a fondness for Blondie's. They're cheap and have great output - perfect for bouncing.

Covered wagons are another cheap source, but it does however require some DIY-ing.

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Try the fotodiox fixtures. (www.fotodiox.com)

 

Or the savage fl series of lights.

I have this one http://www.shopwise2000.com/index.asp?Page...D&ProdID=38 which works very well.

 

Nice links greg, have you used the savage lights? should I expect a similar light as from the kino flo? (I use that just because it's something I know.) Also what would the light quality difference between your link and http://www.shopwise2000.com/index.asp?Page...&ProdID=113 be ?

 

I notice the fotodiox has the same light types - I'm assuming they'd be the same quality of light?

 

thanks.

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Nice links greg, have you used the savage lights? should I expect a similar light as from the kino flo? (I use that just because it's something I know.) Also what would the light quality difference between your link and http://www.shopwise2000.com/index.asp?Page...&ProdID=113 be ?

 

I notice the fotodiox has the same light types - I'm assuming they'd be the same quality of light?

 

thanks.

Hey Mark, i've never used Kino FLo's but I used the Savage's on a shoot and thought they were excellent. People on other forums have said the output is comparable to the Kino's...the thing you loose is the light weight portability of the Kinos. The one I linked to is very portable and light to me, so I can only imagine the convenience of a Kino Flo. I've never read of anyone using those fixtures you linked too, but they seem to be growing in popularity with the photography community and manufactures. Westcott makes one which is almost 3x the cost of that one. I wish I could see one in person.

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Hi,

 

I have done quite a bit of fiddling about with this sort of thing.

 

Fluorescent is great, and the tubes Mr. Brereton mentions are the highest colour temperature I've ever seen at that CRI. The blue phosphors are spikier than the red, so usually, the bluer the tube is, the lower the CRI, which makes high CRI daylight tubes difficult. HF ballasts are easy - some are even dimmable, but they are very expensive and suffer exactly the same problems as dimmable kinos.

 

LEDs are problematic. The CRI isn't acually that bad, but they're very very blue indeed as they're actually blue LEDs with a yellow-emitting phosphor on the front. CT reads at about 12000K on my camera, and it's worth bearing in mind that they aren't actually that efficient - definitely much less efficient than average fluorescents, and probably not that much better than good (halogen cycle) tungsten once you've brought them down to a feasible CT. Problem two is that the commercial types at least have a worryingly short life during which they slowly go purple, as the phosphor is an organic type which decays rapidly under the intense shortwave radiation of the diode. The upside is that you can now buy white LEDs by the bucketful on ebay and there are tungsten balanced types available (CRI unknown). Driving them can be a bit of a pain unless you're willing to put a series resistor on every one of them (ebay auctions often include these) and suffer the efficiency shortfall.

 

The big upside of LEDs is that you can produce a soft lightsource that is also pretty directional in a very small space. This is otherwise hard.

 

I have built lights using cold-cathode fluorescent tubes. The off the shelf types are also very blue, almost cyanish, but the CRI is OK with filtering and efficiency is reasonable. The same phosphor technology for fluorescents is effective here and you can get accurately balanced daylight and tungsten emitting devices. Ballasts for CCFL are almost invariably Royer converters which are intrinsically HF, and decent ones (which don't run the transformers too hard to reduce their cost) have an EMI-friendly sinusoidal output, so the sound department won't scream about their radio mics not working. CCFL tubes are available in diameters down to about 3mm - micro-flos are CCFL - and build rather nice arrays. Can be bought cheap in bulk.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Phil

 

This is an excellent thread with great posts. There are links, photos, personal experiences.

 

" HF ballasts are easy - some are even dimmable, but they are very expensive and suffer

exactly the same problems as dimmable kinos."

 

 

One question I have is what are the problems with dimmable floursecents? Thanks.

Edited by Jim Feldspar
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This is an excellent thread with great posts. There are links, photos, personal experiences.

 

" HF ballasts are easy - some are even dimmable, but they are very expensive and suffer

exactly the same problems as dimmable kinos."

One question I have is what are the problems with dimmable floursecents? Thanks.

I would think the only real problem would be with color temperature...

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I would think the only real problem would be with color temperature...

 

That's what I would think, because dimming lights in theater or studio for example shows how

warm they can get as you bring them down. However, I know that there are so called dimmable

H.M.I.s that have dimmer knobs on the ballasts and from what I've heard about them and

dimmable flourescents, color temperature isn't affected (I don't know how but that's what I've

heard.)

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Hi,

 

> One question I have is what are the problems with dimmable floursecents? Thanks.

 

There are a number of intrinsic problems which can't really be solved no matter how clever you get with the electronics.

 

First is the issue that they require a certain amount of power to start and maintain the discharge. This means that they will never be dimmable down to nothing. Usually the best they can do is 20% or so. Also, they won't start at very low levels - a unit might fade down to 20%, but it won't start at 20%, and kinos started at low power produce a bright, photo-flash style pulse as they're turned on as the ballast applies high voltage to the tube to start it.

 

The major convenience problem, however, is that they shift in colour. All fluorescent lamps (and many CCFLs) have a percentage of argon in the gas fill which aids starting, as argon ionises readily, and allows the mercury discharge component to start up and begin pumping the white-emitting phosphors with UV energy. The problem here is that argon glows purple when electrically ionised. The tube is balanced with sufficient yellow-orange emitting phosphors, and the purple glow is dim enough, that the problem is obscured or compensated-for when the tube is at full output. However, turn the power down, and the mercury discharge begins to die off before the more easily-maintained argon discharge. This is the reason that fluorescent tubes, even those that claim to be clever, invariably go pinkish-purple when dimmed. The problem is extremely hard to solve.

 

Phil

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You mention liking china balls. Why don't you use those? They're cheap and given away after a lot of productions.

 

When I was looking into them as a keylight source I was told that the amount of light I would need coming out of them would probably burn the lantern. Also - I need something that can be on longer that 3 hours without burning out which i was warned the daylight fotofloods would.

 

So far.... this is my mental summary....

 

Lowell ego light looks great - but I need more light.

 

Building my own light is probably beyond my skill set.

 

The savage lights are in the lead because they're probably nearly as cheap as it would be for me to build my own. I am very curious to know the quality of the build and how it compares to other lights like kinoflo, rifa, spiderlite.

 

The other more expensive options are: rifa, spiderlight, bowen tri-light. but the savage (with the link provided in an earlier post) is definitely the price to beat. I just wish someone local had them on display. I am curoius about the difference between the open face one and the boxed one.... not sure if there is an advantage to the longer tubed light vs. the cluster of smaller ones in the lightbox.

 

Thoughts are always apprecaited.

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I want to add my contribution here, because I too have experimented extensively with fluorescent lighting.

 

First off, don't get hung up on CRI. This is just plain silly. If you're going to decide against using cheap fluorescent tubes just because the CRI is low, then you're not really considering the mountain of other advantages fluorescents offer. This is even more true when shooting digitally, since your white balance is calculated during demosaicing. Don't worry about the green spike, as long as all your lights have the green spike. It is very easily dealt with in Photoshop.

 

Here is a digital shot I took using the worst, cheapest, crappiest fluorescents you can possibly find, with the worst color temperature possible (4000k):

 

trev_new_03.jpg

 

Here is one on ISO 400 film. There was one additional 3200K light source, so you can see the difference in color between the two:

 

trev_645_01.jpg

 

Again, crappy Philips flo tubes, which I found in a dumpster (I'm not even kidding).

 

This photo shows a bit more of the effects of using a greener light source with a traditional 3200K source. The light on the right side of her face is from a 4 foot, 4 bank rig:

 

trev_645_03.jpg

 

Here's one more, being lit with two 4 foot, 4-banks:

 

dave_01.jpg

 

Keep in mind that the "blown out" look is intentional, and done in Photoshop -- the original images are much less contrasty and "softer."

 

For an idea of how much light these things put out, at ISO 250, I was getting about 2.8 1/2 @ 1/60 sec at about 5-6 feet.

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Fluorescents are great if you shoot safe speeds (motion picture) or have all the lights to match the green spike, and that if you want to have that....but there are certain things that change (minimal but still) when correcting the green out...is like all those talks about shooting 85 uncorrected and then print back and you see a difference in shadow color and so on....(even thou i tested this with 5274) and didn?t get the shadow cast or couldn?t see it....but iwas shooting a scene in 35mm 5218 and I was supposed to change 40 fluorescent tubes that wire the worst ever scene by me and the night before the rental company told me "sorry a bigger moved rented the lights you had booked"....great...and the weird think was that the color meter said one thing but you could actually see a different thing so I was pretty much screwed and I used my digital srl for color balance and added green to like 5 tungsten units (all sort) and matched and the night before shot a test and checked the printer lights..becasue the color meter said the bulbs were daylight with green spike the digital camera said tungsten with huge green spike i went with the camera and all worked fine...only thing si that the skin tones (even corrected) had this weird feel...king of out of life and the this pretty big and excellent DP told me that when he shoots with fluorescents with green spike he lights the actors with this as well (in kinos) but mixes up the Kino with tungsten and normal fluos and when you correct back it works really well...gona do it next time..

M

 

ps: I was finishing on print no DI normal.

Edited by Miguel Bunster
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  • 4 months later...

Hey guys, just posted this thread with some additional info. My searching didn't turn this thread up right away so I naturally started another. Moderator, feel free to join them. My question is more about flicker though. Check the info on the newer lamps I just saw tonight and the others I mention.

 

http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/in...showtopic=23201

 

Sean

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Nice thread. I missed this one before. Really, the hardest part in creating your own lighting fixtures is what I call the "project box." Thats the housing to put it in. There aren't that many off the shelf things that work that well for a pro-looking box when you're finished.

 

When I decided to make my own lights over two years ago (based on the high costs of what was available back then), I did a search for something I could use as a project box but never really found anything existing that was that good enough. So, I drew up some simple plans on letter sized paper and got bids at sheet metal shops and had some relatively simple boxes put together. The most complex part of the boxes was making a slide-in adapter for accessories on the face of it. I think my original boxes cost me on average about $95 each for a 6x55 unit and some of the other types I made.

 

LOL--I used corrugated sheet metal for the reflectors because my search didn't yield a particularly inexpensive solution. The reflector may well be one of the most important parts you can put on a light of any kind to increase its efficiency. I later found that lining the sheet metal with sheet mylar increased their efficiency by TONS.

 

Near the beginning of this project, I thought it would be interesting to document it all so I made a video of it and later started selling that as "Cool Lights". The video was to be targeted to people like myself--independents and small studios with small budgets. Anyway, my first unit was the 6x55 and I've included a picture of it here:

 

330w-1.jpg

 

Then there was a 2 x 55w unit:

 

110w-1.jpg

 

And this very compact 126w unit that used the rare 42w triple twin tube bulbs and used a dimming ballast on this pictured one (these type ballasts are really expensive though!):

 

126w-1.jpg

 

All of those units use separate ballasts hidden underneath the reflectors.

 

Of course, we needed a solution for self-ballasted CFL's too--so I can't forget my "halogen conversion" for a 30w CFL bulb which actually became a useful little nook light of sorts:

 

HalogenConversionWhiteBkgnd.jpg

 

The decision to start a video documenting the whole thing really changed my life completely. The number of projects grew and grew and there were other variations and other lights, lots of people were getting interested and it just turned into a whole business and led me to where I am today here in China where I do all my R&D.

 

I will say that myself and some others have helped to lower the cost of entry into this kind of lighting to the point that DIY almost doesn't make so much sense anymore. What was missing was a "semi-pro" segment for fluorescent lighting. When I first started the project in 2005, the prices were still incredibly high, and there just weren't any semi-pro solutions out there really. As I went to China to manufacture my line of fixtures, the prices were already starting to come down and some other players from the Chinese market were just entering. The next thing I'm attacking is metal halide aka "HMI" which could use a serious "haircut" in price also. Should be some interesting developments in that later this year.

Edited by Richard Andrewski
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