the editman.com

A key to good looking images is light. Without it you seldom get anything nice. There are many different sources to use and in different colour temperatures. A tungsten light is what you normally have at home in incandescent or halogen lights. You can also have fluorescent low wattage sources in tungsten or cooler temperature. A very commonly used light is a Kino Flow when you need a soft source of light. You can also use halogen sources and have the light go through a softbox.

Often a softbox uses a speedring to fit most fixtures but I never liked the time it takes to put one together. But there are ways to put something together that's both easy to use and inexpensive.

The softbox above works like an umbrella and folds easily and fast. In the middle there's an E27 socket to fit a bulb or like in in this case an 85W 5500K balanced fluorescent bulb. This has to be one of the simplest light sources to use and it doesn't cost much. Perfect for someone on a budget.

This softbox costs less than $30 including worldwide shipping and that bulb at about $15 each. It's strong enough to be used as a soft keylight and it's really fast to assembly. Compare that to any fluorescent panel light fixtures that costs way more even if it's a Chinese no-name brand.

A softbox can be great to lit peoples faces. You get a smooth, soft light hitting an object and harsh shadows are avoided. I have used a couple of softboxes with metal sticks that has to fit inside a speedring. One fumbles and it takes a bit of swearing sometimes.

I wanted to try something different using umbrellas for flashes and lights one uses when taking stills. After I've searched the market I found a combination of umbrella and softbox. A great idea so I had to try one.

This is a 90x90cm softbox and used with a flash/umbrella holder it's really fast and uncomplicated to set up. Two minutes up, two minutes down. Much faster than using a speedring.

Disadvantage is it isn't made for big lights like fresnel/Redhead but that wasn't part of my plan. I wanted to use my LED312 panels instead.



I first tried to mount the LED in the middle on the umbrella holder but then the LED itself was in the way and the reflective surface inside didn't provide enough light. So I used one of my articulated arms on the lower part of the tripod inside the softbox and that gave me plenty of light. The image above is with the LED312 on a low setting just to show how it reflects.



One of these LED panels is enough for a normal interview situation. If you need more power one could use two LED312 inside.

I paid $37 for the softbox umbrella so it's a cheapo way to get nice smooth light out of something like a LED panel. It can be easily put inside the tripod bag since the folded assembly is really tiny. Highlights are, fast to assemble and take apart. Quality is okay for $37 and with a little bit of care it'll last a long time. I also like that this wont start to tilt like a chimera-like softbox might do due to they being front heavy. This one has the weight right on top of the tripod.

This fall I first bought one LED312 bi-colour LED panel and then two more. These have been great and super value. I even rented this to other DP's several times and all of them loves them.

The included bag is good but I wanted to put something together that was easier to deal with and that I could fly with without risking it to get broken so I put together this flightcase with all three of them inside.



Three 312 panel, six batteries, three chargers, three power adapters and two car power adapters inside. I also have three articulating arms and I will put three tripod mounts inside.



I highly recommend these LED panels. I've used them as key, fill and backlight and unless you're fighting with sunlight they are powerful enough in most situations. I also have a 300w fresnel kit which is great but not compact and portable as this one.

You can find this one on ebay.

Back from vacation at my familys lovely country house I had a new LED light waiting. This is a copy of Ikan LED312 and has 156 LED in 3200k and 156 LED in 5600k so that one can adjust color on the fly without the need of filters. Well, as I learned later Kinosun manufactures these for Ikan so it's not really a copy but the original! It's a complete package inside a suitable case. Lightpanel, two batteries, dual charger, poweradapter, ball mount and a magic arm.



On the back there's one dial to adjust brightness and one to adjust color. Even a powertest is built in to confirm you have enough juice to last the shoot. According to the manual it will last 100 minutes. If this is with one or two batteries attached I don't know, but you can run it on one or two batteries. These are of the same model as Sony camcorder batteries and very common.



A diffuser is also included that will soften the light but I recommend to use something that takes the edge of LED lights because they hurt the eyes in a way halogen does not.

I find LED panels with only a fixed colour to be an unpure light source. You need to mix 3200 and 5600 kelvin LED to get a decent balance.



I pitched the LED312 against my CN-126 LED light and what a difference! The CN-126 has 126 LEDs in 5600k and a yellow filter to get to 3200k. So they say at least. Comparing how these two lights look is day and night. When the CN-126 is used with the yellow filter it has one ugly greenish cast and without filter it looks blueish in a strange way. On the other hand with the LED312 it looked great. When you adjust he LED312 it is not as smooth as with the CN-126. There seams to be an electronic controlled circuit instead of just a resistor dial to adjust.

This is the first LED light I've encountered that blends pretty well with incandescent or halogen bulbs and that makes it a usable light. I'm getting myself another one because it's a great little light.

Half a year ago I got a small 150W fresnel light. This was just after I got my first LED light panel so it wasn't that interesting at the time. A month ago I got another fresnel, this time a 300W with softbox. The quality of light one gets with these small lights is unbeatable for the price. Okay, the lamp only lasts about 200 hours but they are small and so easy to work with.

I use my Canon 5DmkII mainly to take stills these days and let my AF101 do video. I've been looking for some time now for a wind machine to take stills and found this one in a local store in Stockholm. Three speeds and I like that vintage look all in metal.



I rigged a black muslin backdrop and used the 300W fresnel as key and the little 150W as hair light and took some stills. I guess rigging was only ten minutes and it's one portable kit. I'll get another fresnel because I like what I see!


Canon 5DmkII with Zeiss 85/1.4 lens.

I have one inexpensive LED panel set of three panels. They work great when you need a portable and uncomplicated lightkit. LED lights are by nature cold in kelvin and these are rated at 5400k or similar to daylight. Since all LED lights have a green tint more or less you need to tame it either by filtering with minus green gel, white balance to compensate or remove in post. I would not recommend doing it in post since it can prove to be difficult to get accurate colours afterwards.

Recently I got a colour checker card and a couple of fresnel tungsten lights and I wanted to dig a little bit deeper in how LED compare to a pure tungsten light and how my AF101 can manage to get accurate colours. I would say a card like the one above can be a life saver when you need a point of reference.

First I put one 300W fresnel with softbox pointed at the chart and some skin tones. When having the camera in 3.2K preset it gives a correct colour balance. No surprise. I like the soft warm colour of a fresnel. It's a great little light for interviews or a nice key light. One of the big advantages with a LED light it doesn't get warm like a halogen light. It stays cool and the LED them selfs will last way longer than one halogen bulb.
It's also a bit more time consuming mounting a fresnel softbox and you have to wait until it's cooled down before you can get it into your case.

The LED lights I have came with three filters. Yellow for tungsten, magenta to reduce green and a frost like filter. Since LED have that green tint you'd want some green reducer like magenta even for the yellow and frost filter but you don't get that. I manage to get hold of some 1/2 minus green gel from LA half a year ago and I wanted to test how the yellow filter with my minus green gel would turn out together.

The yellow filter by itself is a bit of a turn off. It has one ugly cast of yellow greenish tone that looks awful. There is no way to dial in a temperature with the dial on the AF101 to get it right. No can do! But if you flip it into AWB and do a calibration it looks spot on and smashingly correct. This camera has rock solid colours even in this tricky situation. When I added the 1/2 minus green gel it did look better but still it's strange colours displayed. You can get it somewhat right, but with a slight green cast which can be removed in post no doubt.

So I came to the conclusion that my LED set can be used with great result if you do let the camera do it's AWB thing. The panels gives plenty of juice and are so easy to dial in just the right amount of light. They almost always need some sort of diffusion like some frost gel to avoid hurting the subjects eyes and you'll also end up with a much more pleasing fall off. But you will run into some problems when you mix these with other tungsten kind of lights. Since they are no way near pure 3.2K due mostly to the green cast it can be very hard to get it right.

They work much better in 5400K and except when used as the only light source I would stay away or at least consider other options to light at 3.2K with LEDs in mixed conditions.

I know there are better LED panels and I'll look into the Bi-colour versions in the fall but for now the fresnel lights are much better. It was a rewarding exercise to compare two types of tungsten lighting and see how my AF101 would handle them.

This was actually my first time using the LED600 light panels to do an interview and they felt very nice to set up and use. Love the dimming and easy swapping of filters. I have two panels and a third on it's way.



These panels give enough to be used as key or fill light or even rim light. I have three Manfrotto 1004BAC stands and these are great. A bit of overkill for these light weight panels. My Canon 5D mkII, Sennheiser G2/JL454 was used to shoot this interview. I must say that slider I have is great. Only time it goes wrong is from user error and really since I got the new cross block from Brian Berkey the cage rig is more solid. This is the one part that flexes and can introduce a less than perfect slide. I didn't have my 7D with me so these images were shot using the little Panasonic FT1.

A week ago I got a small on-camera LED light, the CN126. Now it's time for the big brother of the CN126 to be highlighted, the CN 600-HS.

Made in China is something we are used to and this is no exception. China is the new Made in Japan but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Most electronic parts are made in China and I guess many of the better film making equipment has their manufacturing in China as well.

This LED light panel has 600 LEDs in a 1x1ft square shaped aluminium fixture. It's a solid piece of equipment but the flags/barndoors is not that great. Depart from protecting the panel when transported they don't serve much use. LED panels have very little use of barndoors but at least you can clamp on some soft filter so they are not totally useless. They feel a bit weak but as they are not essential how cares right?




On the back of the unit is a power switch, a dimmer knob, a power connector for 14-15V and a V-lock battery mount. There's also a remote connector but the kit I got didn't have an external dimmer included. The dimmer works between 5% and 100% so even when it's dialled all the way down, there's an idle current going to the LEDs.

The power supply is really small for being a light PSU. But this panel draws only 36W so it can be that small. I mounted it on one of the yokes arm so it's not in the way when rigging and it doesn't get lost. The yoke is some sort of metal and powder sprayed as is the fixture it self. I will also try to mount it on the back side which should work since the unit don't generate any heat to speak of.

Looking at panels from the leading LED panel in film making - Litepanels. This one looks very similar. My guess it's made in almost the same location as this one. Somewhere in the heart of China. I don't expect this panel to be as good as the Litepanels but it's only around 500 EURO including shipping. You can even get them cheaper on ebay!



This model is a spot beamed version and rated at 600W equivalent light output to a halogen lamp. It's harder than a Kino but softer than a halogen light. Included with this kit is three filters that slide in in front of the LEDs. One filter is a minus green that reduces green spikes. It works very well producing spike free images. The panel it self is rated to 5400K and with the minus green filter it's somewhere between 5000K and 5400K. The second filter is a tungsten filter that is supposed to make this light 3200K. It's not strong enough so I ended at about 3900K and with green spiking. So to remedy this I would have to add a minus green filter and a stronger tungsten filter. The third filter being a soft filter which is useless since you'll end up with ugly green spiking.

According to the manufacture and other sources this LED panel has a CRI of >80 with the magenta/minus green filter installed. Higher end LED panels might go up to 85-90 CRI value but for the price this is about what one will get.

Light output is fairly strong but it's hard to compare different type of lights with each other. I got a properly exposed light skinned person at F2.8, 1/200s and ISO200 at about one meter distance. I shot stills. With the tungsten filter I had to reduce green as noted before. Since the CN126 uses the same LEDs ( I presume) you could use the 600 to key and the 126 to fill and it will match.



Also included in this kit was a carrying bag with plenty of room for the fixture, filters, power supply and cable. The only question that I ask my self is how Nan Guang Lighting sounds when compared with names like Litepanels and Cool lights? This is apparently the brand of the CN 600-HS and also the CN126.

LED has come a long way these days. They are such a great little component and when combined with more than a hundred we get something useful for video and photo. I got this very cheap LED on-camera light from ebay. They have the exact same model in Swedish stores but it's priced about six times as much!

Six times as much means you can get six of these for the same price but with much higher light output. These lights are not of high quality. Plastic housing and a little flimsy foot. But they do deliver very much light for the small size. Having 126 LED pointing the same way will hurt your eyes if it's close. It's just blasting from the panel. It runs of six AA batteries or Panasonic SD. A battery tray for the Panasonic SD is included and snaps into place on the rear.



Thank good they are dimmable! Just turn the dial to fine tune light output. I can imagine these being a great way to fill in some shades outdoors if not in direct sunlight of course. Combine three or more and you can model light pretty decent for a small cost. If it breaks you're only about $35 shorter so not a heavy investment. I bought this one to try if LED really can be useful and it seams to work just as it should. There are more rugged models costing ten times more but I guess the LED's will last just as long on the cheaper versions.



Included in this small kit is three filters. A diffuser, a yellow (tungsten) filter and a magenta filter to get rid of some green. The light is rated to about 5400K but I serious doubt they are spot on. I don't think the yellow filter makes it tungsten but at least not as cold as 5400K. There is a small arm and a hot shoe mount under the light and a small foot to place it on a tripod or table. Again cheap quality but as they are so cheap I don't feel it to be a big loss if or when they break. I will look into a bigger brother to this LED panel next week that runs on V-lock or AC!

This week I got a small lighting kit based on fluorescent lights. Three heads, tripods and softboxes.
Everything neatly packaged in a robust black bag.

I had a Redhead-kit but really didn't like it mainly because the heat they generated and the mismatch when mixing Redheads and daylight.

      

At 5500K these are just like daylight and makes skin tones look really nice.
They are soft thanks to the softbox and by the nature of fluorescent lights.
They don't produce much heat and they don't consume a lot of energy. Great!




Even near the softbox you can get a nice soft shading and I like the skin tone.

Now, this is a cheaper kit and it took me some time to get the first softbox together.
This and the somewhat weak tripod stands are the low point.
The rest is okay and you feel comfortable using this to lit a nice lighting for interviews, even with a bit of mood.




If you ever had the pleasure of working with Kinoflow banks of fluorescent light sets the Kinos are much better and easier to setup and transport.
But for the indie on a tight budget why not? There's nothing wrong with the actual light and you can adjust brightness in five levels on each lamp head.