Fluorescent lighting is great stuff. Your lights stay relatively cool, they last practically forever, you get three or four times as many lumens per watt, and you have many more color temperature options than with tungsten. This last benefit is particularly relevant with Red, which delivers its cleanest image at around 5000K. Modern fluorescent bulbs have greatly reduced green spike problems, and of course modern high-frequency ballasts make flicker issues a thing of the past, at least at typical frame rates.

I’ve been meaning to build some lighting fixtures around compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs for a few years now. We finally pulled the trigger and did it last week, because we had a shoot last Friday that we thought they’d be really useful for.

We wanted to use CFLs rather than tube fluorescent because it’s much easier to make a fixture based around CFLs, well, compact. Any fixture containing full-sized tube florescents is inherently going to be unwieldy, not just in terms of transporting it, but in terms of controlling the light as well. Tube fluorescent fixtures are inherently very soft sources, and end up spilling tons of light around. Even Kinos, which have fairly well designed light control mechanisms, have issues with this.

This adventure started, as most of this kind do, with a trip to Home Depot (and a couple of other places) to lay in some supplies. Surface-mount screw-on light sockets, plywood, screws, nuts and bolts, foam core, silver spray paint, heavy staples, electrical wire, plugs, electrical tape, and caps. Then a quick run to B&H to pick up some baby plates ($12 each).

Rather than describing how we put everything together, it’s much easier to just take a look at a few photos of the results:

We’re planning to put a coat of black spray paint on the outside of these when we get the chance, to make them look a little nicer and to block the light that currently leaks through the foam core.

We managed to build three of these in about four hours, figuring out the details as we went along. Each one is lamped with five 27 watt nVision daylight balanced CFLs (also form Home Depot), which (our Red tells us) have a color temperature of almost exactly 5000K. One benefit to this design is that you can reduce output, and even aim the light to some extent, simply by removing bulbs.

Each fixture puts out the equivalent of around 450 watts of tungsten lighting, while using only 135 watts. (With the foam core sides, they’d probably catch fire in fairly short order if you actually put 450 watts of tungsten bulbs into one; with the CFLs the foam core gets no more than mildly warm.) One almost comical benefit of this is that you can plug ten of these fixtures (equivalent to over 4000 watts of tungsten light) into a single 15 amp household circuit, and never run out of power on location again.

How do they look on camera? On our shoot last Friday we basically just used them to throw some extra light around a room lit mostly with practicals, so that wasn’t such an interesting test. The two top shots above were lit with a second Five-Z, but that’s not so interesting either. To get a better sample, I tossed one on a stand and borrowed Nick, one of our Nice Dissolve team members, for a quick demo:

That’s a single light about three feet from the subject, shot at f/1.8, 400 ASA, with a 1/500 shutter, on a Canon DSLR. If you map to 1/48 and Red’s ASA 320, you’d be at around an f/5.6.

We’re still looking into various light control mechanisms, but what we’ve got so far is a small, bright, cool, daylight-balanced softbox — a pretty useful item to have around. I can see myself reaching for these in preference to our “real” lights on a lot of shoots. I expect we’ll be building more, varying the design in different ways, etc. We’ll probably try one with nine bulbs, and we’re going to order some higher wattage CFL bulbs and see what we can build around those.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Lighting. 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.