Fluorescent Light Kits vrs. Photoflood Kits for Interior Architectural Work - BEST???

[MMeticulous]

Hello,

I need to shoot several small commercial interiors: banks, offices, warehouses, community centers, etc...

I've never shot commercial interiors before. In the past with residential interiors, I used 2 Smith-Victor 250w ECA Photoflood light stands.

I need MORE light than those two lights can provide for my commercial shoots, so I'm wondering whether I should buy a couple 500w photoflood stands to add to my collection, or whether I should totally change directions and buy a complete fluorescent kit instead. Smith-Victor seems to offer comparable wattage with Fluorescent Digilight kits.

My attraction to fluorescent is three fold:

1. The bulbs don't put off nearly as much heat.
2. The bulbs last MUCH longer.
3. I think the color temperature will be closer to what I will find in most commercial environments.

I often use my speedlight flash in conjunction with the light stands (but maybe that's not good anyway). Which light source is closer in color temp. to my flash?

Which type of light stands would everyone recommend (between the fluorescent digilights and the photoflood lights) for shooting interiors, as I've described?

I need to make this decision quickly, so I'm hoping that I can learn from someone elses experience instead of making a purchase that I later regret.

One concern I have with fluorescent, is whether it will really and truly put off as MUCH light as the photofloods. I need to be able to illuminate large areas. I guess color is a concern too, but I really don't know what is best.

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks!
Jeff

 

[Garbz]

By colour temperature being close to what you'd find in a commercial environemnt do you mean sickening differences in colour between lights, and even between frames due to changing temp depending on the phase angle of the voltage they run on, or do you mean horribly flat lightening which can turn the most beautiful person and lovely setup interior into a lifeless colourless and cold stale environment?

Excuse the negativity but I have never heard of "fluorescent" used in the same sentence as "attractive" when talking about photography. I can't think of a worse commercially available light source.

Admittedly I don't know about these kits. Are they some kind of magical fluros which don't exhibit the problems that all other fluros present to photography?


Just a few things:
Mixing colour temps is bad unless going for the specific different colour effect, and fluros have not only colour temp variations but massive shifts in tint off the standard black body curve. Also as mentioned they typically change slightly depending on which part of the power curve you hit when you push the button which makes white balancing a series of photos a nightmare.

Bearing in mind that I no nothing about the product I can only recommend do not go with the fluros if colour is a concern. Stick with a product that produces a black body curve which includes all incandescent light sources (halogens, floods, camera flashes).

 

[MMeticulous]

By colour temperature being close to what you'd find in a commercial environemnt do you mean sickening differences in colour between lights, and even between frames due to changing temp depending on the phase angle of the voltage they run on, or do you mean horribly flat lightening which can turn the most beautiful person and lovely setup interior into a lifeless colourless and cold stale environment?

Hmmm.... you don't sound too excited about the prospect of "cool" lights! :mrgreen:

By color temp being closer to what is in commercial environments, I meant that most commercial environments have existing fluorescent lighting which I will be forced to work with regardless.

Thanks for the feedback though. Does everyone else agree that fluorescent comes straight from the pit of hell and is to be avoided at all costs? Does anyone have experience with these light kits?

Thanks again.
:meh: Jeff

 

[MMeticulous]

Does NO one have experience using these lights???

 

[Garbz]

Can you checkout these lights before you buy?

Take a DVD along, or a prism, or better yet a colour checker chart, and play with them. A good light source like a flash will make a picture like this:

Source:Tech-news: Latest from the world of gadgetry and technology


A crap lightsource, I.e. one that comes from the pits of hell to make your colours all around look horrible looks like this:

Source:Fluorescent lamp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


If you have a colour checker chart go and take some photos of it in natural light, and flash light, and then test it under these lights. Make sure everything is RAW and then perfectly white balance them against the grey squares and note the colour accuracy.

If primarily your concern is brightness, then I would imagine these are 700watt equivalent lights which sound reasonably bright to me.

 

[Don Kondra]

Hi Jeff,

I used a similar system for the better part of a year. Mine had 4 bulbs/head.

First thing I did was purchase larger bulbs

They worked just fine for in studio product shots but I would be leary of using them for interior shots.

Although power is an issue I would be more concerned with mixing light temperatures. You would have to shoot in aperture mode and the existing lighting is likely in the 3000-4000k range. The light stands are 5500k. I suppose you could change the bulbs to match....

I think you should consider studio strobes.

An example. This is my kitchen, first shot is in aperture mode mid afternoon.

Same thing with one B1600 and 2' x 3' softbox above camera.

Cheers, Don

 

[RyanLilly]

The fluorescent lights may work for your purpose, and they are probably a lot cheaper than other options. But I think you would be happier with studio strobes.

You can add whatever modifier you need to Best suit the situation(softbox, umbrella, etc) They have very consistent color temp so you can easily then use gel to match the temp of the strobes to the lighting of the building.

To match cool white fluorescent get several levels of PlusGreen, for incandescent, get some CTO, for high pressure mercury you may want some cto and plusgreen. Or ballence the strobes to sunlight comming in from the windows, and depending on the weather you might even need some blue. The list goes on.
Look at rosco.com for some of there color guides, check out LEE filters also, they are big in video and cinema.

 

[Don Kondra]

Uh, match the light of the strobes to the light of the building???

If you are shooting with studio strobes, as in Alien Bees, etc., the light in the building doesn't matter...

Unless you mean "strobes" as in those dinky little speedlight thingees :lmao:

Cheers, Don

 

[Buckster]

Uh, match the light of the strobes to the light of the building???

If you are shooting with studio strobes, as in Alien Bees, etc., the light in the building doesn't matter...

Don's right. If you want to flood a room with light in order to produce the lifeless, unappealing image he posted as #2 above, it doesn't matter.

On the other hand, if you want to produce the kinds of images seen in House Beautiful, study the temperatures of light, and learn how to work your artificial lighting to complement the natural ambient light of a room, rather than overpower it. That would include learning how to use gels on your strobes.

Unless you mean "strobes" as in those dinky little speedlight thingees :lmao:

No, that advice would apply to any kind of strobes used, regardless of size.

 

[RyanLilly]

You can also gel the fluorescent, or even entire windows to match the sun to your lights, for that matter, but that eats up quite a bit of gel.

Unless someone actually designed the architectural lighting, not just picked out light fixtures that matched the decor, most interior lighting looks really Bhahhh...:meh:. I don't know the exact purpose of your photos, but I wouldn't hesitate to put just a hint of artistic thought into lighting. Just because an office building has bland fluorescent, flat, unflattering lighting, doesn't mean you need to mimic that look. Light it to be appealing; a place where you would want to work.

 

[Don Kondra]

RyanLilly and Buckster,

I posted an OOC test shot for demonstration purposes and will gladly take my licks for that

Would either of you care to post a real world shot and explain how it was achieved?

Including camera settings? My #2 was in manual at 1/200 - f10.. I think I just set the strobe at 100%.

Cheers, Don

 

[RyanLilly]

No problem Don, and I wasn't trying to be a jerk or anything, just throwing out one way to do it. And certainly, overpowering existing light will work, and sometimes works best when dealing with multiple light sources of different types. Also I do use speedlights with are easy to gel, Studio strobes can be more of a pain to gel, but then again they were typically intended for a controlled environment, like a studio, Where you just white balance to the color of the strobes.

I'll probably be taking some shots of some equipment for work tomorrow, so I'll see If I can shoot some useful examples while I'm doing that.

Anyway, when there are multiple sources, I usually an inclined to balance to the prevailing source, or to elements that I have no control over. If there is stong sunlight comming through the windows, and I wanted to maintain that look, I would try to eliminate other sources like overhead lighting, then use strobes as fill. Or in a office bulding where I could not control the the flourescent lighting, I could gel green to the florescents and sacrifice the sunny look, Or If I had the extra power to mostly overpower the florescents I could balance to daylight and keep some of the natural sun light. It always a compromise in an uncontroled enviroment, so its nice to have several options to play with.

 

[MMeticulous]

I certainly appreciate all the feedback, I'll respond with a few specific questions later when I have a minute, but right off the top of my head, what I'm wondering, is exactly what you all are referring to as studio strobes? Are you just talking about additional "flashes" set to slave?

Can someone please post a link to a specific product that you are recommending?

Thanks a LOT!
:mrgreen: Jeff

 

[Buckster]

While it's not a whole room, the concept is the same...

Ambient light from doorway at camera left Lights the background and side of my face and shirt. A 580 EX II @ 1/2 power on camera right with Sto-Fen & ceiling bounced, another 580 EX II with Sto-Fen on camera and pointed up 45 degrees @ 1/32 power for fill completes the lighting on the subject: yours truly.

How it's done: Meter the ambient light, and set up the exposure for it. Then use additional lighting as needed to fill in the blanks on particular subjects or key areas that you feel need to be highlighted in some way, dialing them in with control on the strobes themselves, or through ETTL, or by flagging and or diffusing them, or by simply moving them into position using calculations produced by the guide numbers.

In this case, I also wanted to balance the ambient light from the door with that from the monitor. To do that, I used the door itself as a flag to temper how much light came in through the doorway. To do that, I used my meter by taking a reading on the bright part of the screen and one of the dark part of the screen, then finding the average.

According to my Sekonic L-558R meter, at ISO 400 and f/3.5 that I chose to throw the background OOF to isolate my ugly mug better, I needed a shutter speed of 1/15 to make that happen. Then it was a matter of moving the door until the wall gave me a reading close to that, then setting up my strobes to do the same.

Why go to all the trouble to figure all that stuff out and set it up? Well, that's the whole point of light control: It allows us to shoot a scene where neither the ambient light nor the strobe light overpowers the other. Instead, they work in concert to produce a more natural look for the scene as a whole - if that's what we want. We can, of course, use it in other creative ways that are not at all natural.

What we pretty much never do though is just blast away at 100% indiscriminately and flood the whole scene in a blinding flash of non-creative light, unless we're really looking for snapshot quality. If that's what someone wants to do, I suggest they save themselves the money on gear and time on education, and just get a P&S and start pushing the button.

In this situation, the ambient light was produced by the sun, so no gels were necessary to balance the color temperature of the strobes, but had the light been from a different source, say tungsten or fluorescent, the proper gels could have been applied to achieve an overall correct color temperature, or used in creative ways to produce areas of differing color temperature for effect.

Joe McNally has some interesting vids and sections in his books that show how he often uses a CTO over the strobe for the main and color balances for it, which pushes his background into a much cooler temperature for creative effect. Of course, he's not alone in this practice. It's actually quite common.

If most of the ambient light is properly exposed, yet there are still hot spots that are blown out, find ways to flag or diffuse the source to achieve a better balance. If necessary, shut them off or curtain them off. If you're ready to go all out for your craft in order to achieve a truly great photo, install temporary dimmer switches to control them. There's always HDR to resort to also.

Most books on lighting techniques cover this stuff, and especially books on interior lighting techniques. There are some marvelous examples including lighting diagrams and full tech info in my 20 year old copy of "Professional Photographic Illustration" by Kodak, as well as in "Learning To Light" by Roger Hicks and Frances Schultz.

House Beautiful is a fantastic source for ideas on lighting interiors, and all it takes is a little thought to reverse-engineer the light to get a pretty good idea of how it was modified and controlled.

 

[Don Kondra]

Hay Jeff,

Take a look at this - AlienBees: Illuminating the Galaxy with Professional Photographic Lighting Equipment

I think of "flashes" as "can be mounted on or off the camera" and "strobes" as stand alone units...

And for continuous lights see - Photography Studio Equipment by Alzo Digital



RyanLilly and Buckster,

I also do not mean to be a jerk, I'm just real interested in how others approach lighting, whether it is interiors, studio or outdoor.

RyanLilly, please post some examples if you can and thank you both for sharing your thought process.

By now I think Jeff is hearing "kerching, kerching"

Cheers, Don