Home Depot Week: Fluorescent Lights and Accessories
This is another area I will be getting into when I have a little free time. Fluorescent fixtures are so cheap and so bright, you can use them as portrait light sources very easily.As you can see, there are lots of shapes and sizes. Normal people see kitchen fixtures. I see soft boxes, strip lights and ring lights.
More on the lights and accessories after the jump.
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Okay, follow me for a sec. Say you have one dinky little flash. Why not consider two fluorescent strip lights for a high-glam foreground scheme and use the flash for the background light?
Seriously, you could mount them vertically (one per light stand) or horizontally (one over your camera, one under, one stand supports the left side of each fixture, one supports the right.) You'd get some very cool clamshell and/or dual sidelight schemes for under $100.
Better yet, throw up a strip light as a side/rim light on each side and umbrella the front to channel your frugal inner Greenberg. (If you want to make the subject cry, shoot another photog and tell him how little you paid for the lights...)
If you are a more MacGuyver-ish, you should be able to find a circular fixture that will work as a ringlight. You'll likely have to cut a hole in the center of the fixture after having relocated the ballast to somewhere off-board.And if you do this, please insulate the crap out of it. Be safe.
(Some of those progressive Seattle types are already all over this one. Click on the pic for more info.)
Remember, you'll want to green any flashes you use along with the fluorescents and set you camera to fluorescent white balance. For better color, check which bulbs match your camera's fluorescent white balance before purchasing by shooting the various bulb displays and seeing which looks the whitest.
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Moving down the aisle a little, we get to the cool, prismatic diffusers. How does $7 for a 2x4-foot sheet hit you? (Yeah, me, too.)This is wonderful stuff. It diffuses the light and is designed to be very efficient. It is cheap because it is hardware, not photo gear.
If you have a Dremel tool, this stuff cuts pretty easily. (Ringflash diffuser, anyone?)
You can also use this to make ugly directional sunlight much softer or to diffuse a bare flash. And of course, it works well to front those strip-light fixtures mentioned above.
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by David, at 2:13 AM.
18 Comments:
What a timely topic for me. I have been working on a similar set-up for the past couple of days.
I am using fluorescent grow bulbs for plants, which are 6400K. Hopefully close enough to SB flash color output that I can avoid gelling the flashes.
I am experimenting with coloring the diffusion panels with paint made for staining glass. So far the yellow is great, only about 2/3 stop light loss. The red is not working as well, 3 1/3 stops of light loss. I'll try another with fewer coats of paint.
Keep up the good work. Your ideas are very inspirational for me, a Nikon with SB(s) shooter in the beautiful Okanagan Valley, BC, Canada.
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There's a video at
fototv.de
which demonstrates the use of fluorescent lights to achieve a cat-eye-specular-highlight look. It's in German but even if don't understand what he's saying you'll see the technique.
I've been using a ring bulb for well over a year now.. There's a few of these images in my photostream.
I will point out that if you are buying the ballast as well make sure you buy a high frequency ballast, because normal, low frequency, ballasts have a lot of colour variance throughout the cycle. With HF models, the colour is more stable.
Kino Flo are the best of this type (sadly hard to get here), but a HF ballast will get you well along the way.
No mention of shutter speed limitations? I thought fluorescents required a shutter speed of 1/60 or slower in order to capture the full color cycle, otherwise you get varying results. Maybe the newer lights don't have this problem?
The following list is from a Philips catalogue, the colour is printed in the product label after the model with a / and a number XXX:
2.500 to 2.800 ºK Incandescent and fluorescent with colors /827 and /927 also white sodium.
2.800 to 3.500 ºK Halogen and fluorescent /830 and /930.
3.500 to 5.000 ºK Fluorescent /840, /940 also bulbs with metallic halogen (sorry my English is not so good).
5000 ºK and so on, these are "day light" fluorescent /850 /865 /95 /965.
There is also another concept in fluorescent lighting it's called in Spanish "IRC indice de rendimiento del color" my be something like colour performance index, and the fluorescents are classified from 100 perfect full colour to 0.
Incandescent has 100 because of it's continuous range but different fluorescent products with the same colour temperature may have different performance, take care and look at the product. characteristics.
Newer lights on electronic ballasts don't flickr and don't seem to have a problem with faster shutter speeds. Also... you can now buy fl light tubes that are daylight balanced. They do cost more though.
Be careful cutting those prismatic diffusers. The plastic is often brittle and results in very sharp edges. Be sure to buff them down after you make the cut.
Phillips now puts out what they call a 'Super Daylight' fluorescent bulb in both tube style and in a cfb format.
2 32W (maybe 35? can't recall) which are equivalent to 100W incandescent are about 16 Canadian, or you can get a pack of 6 of the 60W equivalent ones for 20 dollars. These are nice because they can screw into a homebrew lightbox nice and fast on the cheap.
They are rated at 6500k, and do cast a really nice white light.
For a ready ring light look for a magnifying work lamp. This typically has a magnifying lens in the middle, and a fluorescent ring light around it. The lens can easily removed, and you are left with a safe ring light. There are a variety at http://www.affordaproducts.com/magnify.htm
The last one we bought has a 3.5" opening for the magnifying lens, a 6400K fluorescent bulb, a goose neck desk stand, for under $30.
It's amazing what some lights from Home depot can do. As Eric said, there are definitely some shutter speed limitations, but for a quick, cheap light source, they're not bad.
I occasionally use some 125 watt energy saver bulbs in the standard Home Depot reflectors. I've been pleased with the results.
Here's a shot I did using nothing more than two of these bulbs and a large foam core reflector: Halloween Makeup Shot
I've seen some incredible work with homemade florescents done by Joe Edelman. He describes it in detail on a podcast at http://www.studiolighting.net/lightsource-photography-podcast-e026-joe-edelman/
His website is http://www.joeedelman.com/
One other thing to look at is the CRI, or Chromatic Rendering Index, of the light. In addition to the overall color cast of the bulb, the CRI gives you an idea of how even the light is across the spectrum. Fluorescent lights, by definition, are not truly full spectrum, but approximate it by having peaks that overlap. This is why sometimes clothes look good on a sales floor but not so good in the changing room (where they'll often use better bulbs). Bright Sunlight has a CRI of 100, as a point of reference, and expensive "photography grade" bulbs will be in the high 90's.
I'm wondering about how to connect these kinds of lights to our light stands. Anyone?
The anonymous comment about the magnifying glass lamps sounds promising. Great thinking, and I'm sure I would be able to come up with some marginal utility in the actual magnifying glass to boot!
well, it looks like fluorescents have come a long way. back in the 90s, i tried using a fluorescent ring bulb for macros with a fl filter (shooting chromes) which ended up eating so much light that the setup was only useful for stills.
i later tried this with digital with the same old fixture several years ago, and found the image quality to be quite poor. i didn't know it then, but perhaps it had to do with the additional noise/gain in the red channel shooting digital.
Hey anonymous at the top, just make sure that you aren't giving you subjects a high does of UV, not to good for people and will give off weired colors with digital.
@vto: the numbers you quoted also indicate the CRI (you mention it as IRC, mike mentions it as well).
The first number indicates the CRI, the last two indicate the light color.
Fox example:
830 = CRI 80, 3000K
865 = CRI 80, 6500K
965 = CRI 90, 6500K
The higher CRI the better, so you obviously want to stick with 9s.
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