Continuous lighting to Fstop at certain distance

[jwashburn]

The product I am looking at is Impact™ Series

It's a 20,000 Lumen light source. The reason I am looking to this is to light a large warehouse that has 25-foot ceilings. I am guessing about 5000 sq feet. I only need the center 3000ish feet to be lit up. The warehouse has the typical T12 fluorescent bulbs of which not all of them work. It has a couple of skylights and big roll-up doors, but since its Winter shooting photos in there after 4pm is really hard.
I am shooting action. In order to get 1/500 of a second, you need between 8000 and 10,000 ISO and between 1.4 and 1.8. Its really depends on which part of the warehouse you are in. Some sections are a little brighter than others.

I have been experimenting with on-camera flash, with and without modifiers without much luck. You either get that terrible overly flashed look or some dark mushy looking photo.

So my thought was to look at some Home Depot style work lights, which led me to the product I listed above. So what I am trying to figure out is how bright will these lights be at 25 feet away.
With my limited practical knowledge of the inverse square law, it seems that about 8 feet away I am at 2% of the initial light. So 400 Lumens.
Does 400 Lumens give me enough light to drop the ISO or bump my F stop up a little?

 

[tirediron]

You're going to need a LOT of those lights to do anything useful. I'm not knowledgable enough on LEDs to figure out exactly what 192 watts of LED equals in terms of incandescent, but it's not going to come close to what you need. Strobes are the way to go. Last year I had a job shooting a military parade in this venue:

The ceilings are 40' (or near enough) at the peak, and the floor space is something in the order of 30,000 sq ft. I used 5 or 6 Speedotron Brownline M11 heads with 400 w/s going to each head, for a total of 2,400 w/s. This gave me 1/250, f5.6, ISO 640 +/- 1/2 stop over the whole floor. I bounced the lights off of the ceiling and it worked very well. I had the advantage of a domed, light ceiling which made for good light spread, and granted it wasn't the most exciting light, but it worked well overall:

and with some minor tweaks to the highlight & shadow sliders the end result pleased everyone.

 

[jwashburn]

You're going to need a LOT of those lights to do anything useful. I'm not knowledgable enough on LEDs to figure out exactly what 192 watts of LED equals in terms of incandescent, but it's not going to come close to what you need. Strobes are the way to go. Last year I had a job shooting a military parade in this venue:

The ceilings are 40' (or near enough) at the peak, and the floor space is something in the order of 30,000 sq ft. I used 5 or 6 Speedotron Brownline M11 heads with 400 w/s going to each head, for a total of 2,400 w/s. This gave me 1/250, f5.6, ISO 640 +/- 1/2 stop over the whole floor. I bounced the lights off of the ceiling and it worked very well. I had the advantage of a domed, light ceiling which made for good light spread, and granted it wasn't the most exciting light, but it worked well overall:

and with some minor tweaks to the highlight & shadow sliders the end result pleased everyone.

That looks amazing. I will do some strobe research

 

[Derrel]

The 360 degree light dispersion would cut brightness quite a bit compared against say, a 50-degree beam spread from a parabolic reflector.

Studio flashes would give short-duration, action-stopping flash pops.

 

[Overread]

What kind of action are you shooting? People, animals, machines?

That might dictate what is the most suitable approach in terms of specific equipment, however I'd agree with the others that ideally flash would be the best approach. Properly positioned and controlled it gives you fast bright light bursts. Getting enough light for high speed action from a stand lamp is going to require a very bright light source and that's going to affect whoever you get to perform the action. If its a machine that's less of an issue, but you're still looking at a lot of light power required.

 

[jwashburn]

It's CrossFit. I was being cheap. Trying not to drop $5000 on lighting. It's only a hobby.

Thanks for the confirmation everyone

 

[Overread]

You shouldn't need to drop anywhere near that amount on lighting unless you want too.

CrossFit also sounds like it could be really affordable to light too! The subject isn't running around an arena, heck it seems like a fair bit happens in quite a confined area. So you could easily get some studio lights and stands as well as some cheaper end softboxes or umbrellas and have more than enough light to do good results. Cables on teh floor would be the only issue, but long as you setup right you'd be fine.

Or if you want to be more mobile speedlites on a stands - a couple of them would easily give you a lot of lighting without so many cables (there are wireless triggers out there now - Canon has them built into their latest line of flashes whilst companies like Cactus make triggers that can fit to most flashes on the market)

 

[tirediron]

It's CrossFit. I was being chea Trying not to drop $5000 on lighting. It's only a hobby.

Thanks for the confirmation everyone

You shouldn't need to drop anywhere near that amount on lighting unless you want too.

Yep... all the lighting I used to light the armoury shown above will cost <$500 on eBay.

 

[Derrel]

speedotron brown line | eBay

This Speedotron D1604 power pack has 1600 Watt-seconds of total power, which can be sent through up to 4 light units. Studio Lights Speedotron brown line | eBay

This is a lot of flash power.

This is a Brown Line M11 flash head...$50 from Adorama...a rugged, capable, customizable flash head. Speedotron M11 Brown Line Flash Head - SKU#1055562 | eBay

 

[tirediron]

speedotron brown line | eBay

This Speedotron D1604 power pack has 1600 Watt-seconds of total power, which can be sent through up to 4 light units. Studio Lights Speedotron brown line | eBay

This is a lot of flash power.

This is a Brown Line M11 flash head...$50 from Adorama...a rugged, capable, customizable flash head. Speedotron M11 Brown Line Flash Head - SKU#1055562 | eBay

If you do opt for Speedotron gear, I strongly recommend spending a little more and getting the lights with the black connectors like this vice the older silver connectors. The black connectors are a push-on style as opposed the silver which screw on. It's a minor thing, but when you're putting up and striking a lot of gear, a half-second to push/pull vice 20 seconds required to thread each connector.

 

[Derrel]

Yeah, I agree, the newer, Speedotron Brown Line black connector-equipped light units are much faster and easier to set up or change than the older, silver-connector thread-on type light units..but for a noob to the Brown Line system, the threaded connectors are a pretty good insurance policy against connecting or disconnecting the lights without taking the time to turn the power supply to OFF. All things being equal, which they seldom are, I prefer the black-connector vintage lights, but at the same time, when using one to four light units, and not changing the power levels too often, there's no need to connect or disconnect lights except once at the start,and at the end of the shoot. If one uses the lights in Symmetrical power mode, there's no need to swap lights around on the power supply, since all light have the same power going to them. But yeah....the black-connector lights are very fast and easy to connect or disconnect. I own a mixture of both older screw-on and newer pop-on light units.