Matt Whitney

Hey, everybody!

I'm gonna be renting one of these Luminys lights to simulate a lightning flash in a rainstorm and I've got a couple questions.

First, how would I expose for this? I'm using the lightning flash to illuminate a character. I'll be shooting on 16mm film. We'll be working with supplemented moonlight, but it's the middle of a thunderstorm, so it will be relatively dark in the shot before the lightning. I'm only going to have the light for the day, maybe the day before, so metering in advance doesn't give me a lot of time to problem solve.

Second, I've never worked with one of these lights before and I was hoping to get input from someone who's used them. I need to light up a character, outside at night with heavy simulated rain. The character is 100ish feet from camera on a 50mm, possibly 35mm. Would the 40K parabolic do the trick for that? The 200K seems like overkill.

Thanks in advance for the answers to my questions.

Thanks for the responses!

I actually have all but the last book on your list, Stewart. I'll have to move them up the line.

Tim, this is a great resource. I'll be getting several of these.

Hi, everybody!

I'm prepping a film that's shooting in New Jersey in 16mm and I was wondering if there are any labs that process 16mm in state. 

Kodak's lab directory doesn't list anything, but I wanted to double check before moving on to labs in New York. 

I've been trying to learn everything I can about cinematography for the last 6 months or so, and the biggest hurdle I've been running into is the overwhelming amount of different lights and light accessories available. 

It's all well and good when a tutorial shows me how they lit a scene, but if I have no idea what lights they're using, or why they're using those, I feel lost. 

When I try and go through lists of lights and read up on them, I get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of options. 

I would love any suggestions of where to start to get a good base knowledge of different lights (and I don't just mean the difference between HMI, tungsten, and LED. I understand that. It's that within those categories there seem to be hundreds of options)

Thanks in advance for the help. This site is an amazing resource.