Par 36 pinspot for cinematography?

Bradley Stearn · January 23, 2015

Hi everyone. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience working with par lights for cinematography. I recently invested in some open face redhead lighting, a 650w and a 2kw blonde, both Ianiro lights. I am wanting to purchase some par lights for a more direct/harsh light that I can use for bouncing off poly board/other objects.

I am looking at the Par 36 pinspot light, designed for stage lighting, but I was wondering if anyone has used this specific light before? Is it possible to get 3200k bulbs and 5600k bulbs for it?

David Mullen ASC · January 23, 2015

Spot Pars are nice for a spotty effect but generally for bouncing off of a white board for soft light, you'd use a medium to wide beam to get the spread.

Traditional Par 36 bulbs are tungsten halogen (3200K) but now there are some LED versions which are probably close to daylight. They come in all sorts of base connections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_aluminized_reflector_light

Diameter

The glass envelope or "bulb" of all incandescent lamps is measured in eighths of an inch. Thus a PAR 64 is, nominally, 64 eighths of an inch in diameter. The approximate nominal lamp bell diameter in inches can be found by dividing the PAR size by 8. For example, a PAR30 lamp is approximately 3.75 inches in diameter. Similarly, the diameter in millimeters can be found by multiplying the PAR size by 3.175. For example, a PAR16 lamp is approximately 50 mm in diameter.

PAR36 4.5" diameter

I like to carry some of the small narrow spot Par 20 screw-in edison base bulbs for interiors like bars with overhead sockets for a spotty top light effect.

Aidan Gray · January 25, 2015

Piggybacking off of what David said, it is possible to get dichroic versions of Par36 globes and they can be found several places online. These usually get you to about 5000K with a 3/4EV light loss.

I would recommend against buying pinspots and instead point you towards proper PAR cans. Bundles of them get sold for absolutely nothing on usedlighting.com. They're incredibly versatile fixtures as you have the ability to swap the degrees (focus/zoom) just by swapping bulbs. I LOVE working with PAR cans because they have so much punch in such a small, lightweight fixture. Whenever I want a diffused but large source to play with, I'll usually throw a triple header with 3 MFL PAR64s through 1/2 Grid or bleached muslin. I come from the theatre world so I have more PARs then I know what to do with and I've found some incredible uses for them just by having them at my disposal. They're also dirt cheap and crazy simple to fix. Usually my go-to when recommending lighting fixtures for someone trying to learn more about lighting without breaking the bank.

Adrian Sierkowski · January 25, 2015

I also always keep about 5 PAR64s in my truck and a few PAR56s which I picked up for a shoot years ago and I can't think of a shoot i've seen on since where I haven't used one of them for something.

All my 64s are generally VNSP; but I think a lot of that comes from having worked a lot of night EXTs back east where I'd use them as "streetlights" or backed waaayyy away.