Here’s what $40 of lamps and $40 worth of compact fluorescent bulbs can do.

This is Dar’s Uncle Ron taking his turn in front of my camera to tell his veteran’s story. You can go here for a full-rez HDV still of the frame grab. Notice he is lit very soft, with almost no discernible shadows on his face. Sometimes this technique is desirable for interviews and head shots.

Here’s what the setup looked like…

The lamp to the right is a three-bulb model, and the overhead has a single bulb. Both are the Chinese rice paper style (China Ball) and have long been used in filmmaking for very diffuse, shadow-free lighting. I bought these at Target (a local “big box” retailer) on sale for $20 each. For the key, I used another lamp (far left) with two bulbs shining right onto the talent.

Another interesting component to this “light package” were the bulbs I chose, spiral “compact” fluorescents (CFLs) designed to replace ordinary household incandescent bulbs. Although not typically spec’d. for video work, many guerrilla filmmakers are testing out these “cool” light sources to see if their color rendition is acceptable for video work. Old-style fluorescent tubes have long been the disdain of film, video, and still shooters alike, due to their buzzy ballasts and massive “green spike”, the part of the color spectrum favored by the tubes’ phosphors that can render skin tones a sickly shade of green.

Manufacturers of fluorescent tubes are attempting to resolve the color rendering issues by altering the phosphors used in the coating of the tubes, and utilizing modern, “buzz-killing” electronic ballasts. So now it’s possible to find “full spectrum” fluorescents that render all visible colors of the spectrum in near-equal values… but typically have a much higher price to match.

On my video bulletin boards, I’ve heard a few good things about the latest crop of CFLs found in the Home Depot stores. Not only do they have a good selection of CFL wattages, they also carry multiple color temperatures of bulbs, ranging from “soft white”, which tries to mimic the orange color balance of incandescent bulbs, all the way up to “daylight”, which is actually a very blue light source. I chose the “bright white” bulbs, that are rumored to be very close in color temperature to the “daylight” presets on video cameras, or around 5600K.

I purchased six 30w n:vision Bright White CFLs, rated to have a similar lumen output to a 120w incandescent bulbs. They were around $6/ each. I chose this color temperature bulbs in order to mix fairly naturally on shoots with sunlight, without requiring light-sucking filters or gels. In the capture above you can see daylight coming through the window to the left

For the shoot above, I had three bulbs in the lamp to the right, one in the overhead, and two in the keylight, aimed directly at Uncle Ron from just a few feet away. Doing the math, I had 6 bulbs x 30w = 180 watts of energy. Not even 2Amps @ 120v, and I still had a considerable amount of light output, probably equivalent to a 1000w open-face “hot” light shining through a softbox scrim. And my talent was not sweating or uncomfortable, like they tend to get under the “hot lights.”

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At 0db of gain on my Canon XH-A1, I still had to stop down a bit… around f2.4 or so. Luckily, I was shooting on a very atypical Colorado day: rainy, cloudy, and dim. Had sunlight been streaming through that window, I’d either have to add more light on the talent, scrim or ND the window, or use the light with bounce cards, etc. As it turned out, the lights on the talent were brighter than the dreary day, and the “problem” of having too much daylight was averted to another shoot and another day.

So “how’d it do” on color temp. and rendering? The frame grab at the top was not corrected for color balance and shot with the daylight preset on my A1. Granted, the green of Ron’s shirt, the plant, and the overall room tones would have been pretty forgiving of “green spike”. But Ron’s skin looks like skin to me!

Overall: not bad for $80 worth of lamps and bulbs, eh?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under lighting, cameras. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.