Tutorial Choosing your type of light source

[Tori_T]

Tori_T submitted a new resource:

Choosing your type of light source - Artificial lighting for indoor and outdoor use, by Garry Edwards

We generally use some kind of artificial lighting when we can’t use natural light, so natural light (sunlight) is the gold standard.

In the studio
There are two basic choices, each of which can be sub-divided, these are flash and continuous lighting.

Flash is the tool of choice for nearly all situations, for a number of reasons.

• Flash has the same qualities as sunlight, in the sense that it reproduces all colours of the spectrum just as accurately as the sun. Although...

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[Bristolian]

As always, Garry has produced an interesting and informative article.

I do have a question about the rating of flash that I have had for a while. Is the rating really watt seconds (i.e. watts times seconds) or, as normally written, W/s - which should be interpreted as Watts per second?

 

[Garry Edwards]

Steve,

Technically, the correct term is watt-second, or joule (named after James Prescot Joule, a contemporary of Kelvin, with whom he collaborated. But these terms are now frequently mixed up and used incorrectly - not that it really matters, because everyone is always referring to watt-seconds as a measurement of power, regardless of what they and various sellers actually call it.

 

[TimHughes]

Very useful Garry, thank you. One question - is there a reliable source of validated CRI results for LEDs? I picked up some very reasonably priced Jinbei EFii-60s recently rated 96%. Would have been good to have got that checked out before pulling the trigger.

 

[Garry Edwards]

Very useful Garry, thank you. One question - is there a reliable source of validated CRI results for LEDs? I picked up some very reasonably priced Jinbei EFii-60s recently rated 96%. Would have been good to have got that checked out before pulling the trigger.

Not as far as I know. And anyway, although a low CRI measurement is a clear indication of poor colour performance, it doesn't follow that a high measurement is automatically good, because the measurement regime is itself flawed in that it's no more than an average of the disparity.

 

[TimHughes]

Thank you Gary, understood. FWIW the EFii-60s appear to perform very well on their own and in combination with daylight and with 3 there’s plenty of light for shooting in the studio or decent sized room.