led studio flash

holty

holty

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at present i use bowens 200w studio lights
im looking to buy led studio lights
whats the led equivalent 40w 60 w 100w or is it 200w?
do they have optical flash built in
any recommendations on make etc
 
Hi Holty,

To try and get an equivalent number for LED we need to get the two types of light into the same units.

Flash lights deliver a discrete amount of light - measured in Joules. For reasons' never adequately explained, the photography world expresses this as "Watt-Seconds", and this often gets corrupted to "Watts", but the power (rate of delivery) of the light is not that value. Now, 1 Watt-Second is the same as 1 Joule it's true, but it's a bit like expressing distance as "mph-hours". Continuous lights are measured in terms of Joules delivered per second (Watts). 1 Watt is 1 Joule per second. The longer you leave them on, the more light comes out.

Your Bowens heads are 200 Joule heads - they can deliver a maximum of 200 Joules of Light* each time they flash - no matter how long the shutter is open for. You can figure out the actual power (rate of delivery) if you know the flash duration. 1/500th of second is typical for those older Bowens heads, 200 Joules delivered in 1/500th of a second is around 100 kiloWatts.

That's a lot :/ and if you do find a 100kW LED, it'll be the size of a small van, with compressed coolant and a small nuclear power plant attached to the back.

But let's say you can shoot with a slower shutter speed to let that LED light build up: I reckon for most people, 1/100th is a good minimum speed for shooting people: any slower and you risk motion blur even from small movements in the face. arms etc. To get the same amount of light as a full power burst from your Bowens heads, you'll need a 20 kiloWatt LED. Still the size of a small car, with a very substantial generator attached to it. Looking at it the other way around, with a 200 Watt LED, you'll need to expose the image for a full 1 second to get 200 Joules of light - the same as your 200 Joule Bowens Heads.

Essentially - there is no practical equivalent LED light tbh. To get reasonable shutter speeds with LED, you'll need to shoot at very wide apertures and higher ISO values. It's great for using on location when you need to include other existing light sources that are around the same brightness, but in the studio - almost useless tbh. LED also has a discontinuous spectrum (typically, parts of the magenta range are missing). I do use continuous light in the studio when I need to precisely place slivers of light on a subject's face, and I'm shooting at f/1.8 anyway for a shallow depth of field. For anything else, it's flash all the way. . Better light and bags of it.

What prompted you to consider LED lights? Video perhaps?

Not sure what you mean by "optical flash" btw. LEDs are continuous lights - you just leave them on.

* this is actually the energy in the capacitor - not all of it is delivered as light, but flash is pretty efficient.
 
I'll try to answer your questions, but the starting point has to be understanding them, and then we need to speak the same language, to avoid confusion.

Let's start with your title, because LED isn't studio flash, it's a continuous light - except that our American friends confuse us by calling torches flashlights . . .

And then, before we talk about comparative power, we need to use the correct terminology, which is very different when we compare continuous lighting with flash. Let's start with your "bowens 200w studio lights". They aren't 200w (200 watts) they're 200 W/s or watt-seconds or, if we want to use the correct si unit, 200 joules. What this means is that they produce the equivalent of 200 watts of light during the very brief period of their flash* If they were actually 200 watts, that power would be measured over a period of 1 second.

Moving on to your proposed LED light, this really is in watts, so (say) a 200 watt light would produce the same amount of power as a 200 W/s flash, but you'd need an exposure time of 1 second to get the same exposure. What this means in practice is that, all other things being equal, if the flash duration of your Bowens light is, say, 1/200th second and if you set your camera shutter speed to 1/200th to get the same (limited) action-freezing capability, the flash would be 200 times more powerful than the LED light.*

* Actually, it's power consumption, not power production or delivery, but I'm just simplifying things.

But, the power comparison above applies to filament bulbs, not to LED lights, which are more efficient than filament lamps. LED lights vary in efficiency but are usually accepted to be somewhere around 5 - 10 times as efficient as filament lamps, and the cheaper ones tend to be somewhere nearer to 5 times greater efficiency.
so, if we assume an efficiency factor of x5, a 40 watt LED lamp should be about as efficient as a 200 watt filament continuous light and produce about the same power as that 200-watt filament light and the same power as your Bowens 200 W/s flash provided that you set your shutter speed to 1 second.

If you only want to use your LED light for still life photography and have a good tripod, then a one-second exposure could be viable, but of course if you're going to use it for photographing people, animals etc and want to use a shutter speed of 1/200th to freeze most movement, then your LED will need to be 200 times more powerful, at 8,000 watts, which obviously isn't practicable. There are workarounds of course - very high ISO, quite slow shutter speeds, fairly large lens apertures but, all things being equal, the flash will be roughly 200 times more powerful.

I'm not sure what you mean by "do they have optical flash built in" because they don't flash, But, there is now a combined LED and flash, I haven't tried it or even looked at it, but I'm guessing that it's both types of light combined into a single body. https://www.lencarta.com/godox-fv200-200w-high-speed-sync-flash-continuous-led-light.

Hope this makes sense.

Edit: Crossed with Owen, who has explained it perfectly:)
 
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Big Thanks to the two of you for the great explanations i did not know they where continuous light and didn't flash duhhhhhhh
just that use to model light and then big flash
so no need to ask about triggering the flash if its on all the time
the one im looking at are godox sl-200w mk2 led on flea bay they say 200w/s
do you think there worth buying ? at present i have 5 fully working bowens 200 w/s lights
would i need to buy 5 led lights
 
it’s easier to advise if you tell us what you want to do.
You certainly could use LEDs for photography, but in raw power terms they’re expensive, they have advantages in some situations, and disadvantages in others. Knowing what you plan to do will get you the best advice.
 
Phil V said:
it’s easier to advise if you tell us what you want to do.
You certainly could use LEDs for photography, but in raw power terms they’re expensive, they have advantages in some situations, and disadvantages in others. Knowing what you plan to do will get you the best advice.
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Agreed, the more we know about your needs, the more we can help.
holty said:
Big Thanks to the two of you for the great explanations i did not know they where continuous light and didn't flash duhhhhhhh
just that use to model light and then big flash
so no need to ask about triggering the flash if its on all the time
the one im looking at are godox sl-200w mk2 led on flea bay they say 200w/s
do you think there worth buying ? at present i have 5 fully working bowens 200 w/s lights
would i need to buy 5 led lights
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This one? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/UK-Godox...42828095ad2131b01d14|ampid:PL_CLK|clp:2334524

If so, that's just an overpriced LED light, no flash, from what I can glean from the description.

If you decide to go for LED lights then, because of the massive disparity in power, it would make sense to replace all of your flashes with them, although this isn't something that I would personally do.
 
holty said:
full length model shots
group family shots
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Then there's no good reason to not use flash.
Continuous lights are uncomfortable for people to have directed at them.

So... what's wrong with your current lights? why do you want to buy new?
 
holty said:
just got a bit of gas :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO:
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Fair enough - but if you want to spend a grand on new lights, and you don't expect to use them for video, you should look into some battery lights that give you something 'extra' that you don't have now - the ability to create an outdoor studio. or if you really only want to replace what you have, some newer Godox equivalents.
 
you know what its like you get something in your head and then the blinkers are on :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO:
 
holty said:
you know what its like you get something in your head and then the blinkers are on :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO:
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Fair enough:)

OK, hopefully you now know that LED lights, for your purpose anyway, would be a very bad choice. Phil is right, if you're determined to buy some new toys then the money would be much better spent on powerful portable flash that will allow you to take shots that you can't do now. Whether or not it's a good idea to upgrade your existing Bowens lights will depend very largely on what you have. Bowens made 200j lights for about 40 years, the old ones were pretty terrible (limited power adjustment, slow recycling, very inconsistent colour temperature and power output) but the later ones were pretty decent. If yours are the old ones then there will be benefits in replacing them, otherwise not.
 
thanks Gary
my main concern is getting replacement bulbs if they blow
the model bulbs are 10 a penny
but i cannot find the main flash bulb anywhere !!!!
 
holty said:
thanks Gary
my main concern is getting replacement bulbs if they blow
the model bulbs are 10 a penny
but i cannot find the main flash bulb anywhere !!!!
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Flash tubes should be good for at least 50,000 flashes, and sometimes twice that, so it's fairly rare for replacements to be needed.
And you may be able to get them from WEX, as well as from specialist repairers, if you tell them the model number of your flash heads.
 
Garry Edwards said:
Flash tubes should be good for at least 50,000 flashes, and sometimes twice that, so it's fairly rare for replacements to be needed.
And you may be able to get them from WEX, as well as from specialist repairers, if you tell them the model number of your flash heads.
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My older Lencarta Elite Pro lights are around half a million pops and on original flash tubes!
Replaced a handful of capacitors in that time though.
 
Richard King said:
Maybe the product in question is the rotalux flash.. Yup they use overpowered LED's to flash

However the power levels are still poor
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Rotolight? Yes they claim the light is 5 times brighter when it flashes. As long as you have it plugged into the mains.,,, On the batteries, it's a mere 2.5 times the continuous brightness. Oh, and those batteries? It takes 6 x AA's. In 2020. It's also £200. Two hundred actual Earth pounds. I have a Viltrox 116 t that is about the same brightness, is colour adjustable, and takes Sony NPF batteries (that power lights, cameras and other stuff in the movie industry). It's £30.
 
Scooter said:
Rotolight? Yes they claim the light is 5 times brighter when it flashes. As long as you have it plugged into the mains.,,, On the batteries, it's a mere 2.5 times the continuous brightness. Oh, and those batteries? It takes 6 x AA's. In 2020. It's also £200. Two hundred actual Earth pounds. I have a Viltrox 116 t that is about the same brightness, is colour adjustable, and takes Sony NPF batteries (that power lights, cameras and other stuff in the movie industry). It's £30.
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Which proves the effectiveness of their kind of marketing:(
 
Garry Edwards said:
Which proves the effectiveness of their kind of marketing:(
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It certainly does. It's a masterclass in "created value": making an LED light "flash" (ie over-driving it for the duration of the shutter operation ~1/320th of a second) and then claiming it has "HSS to freeze action". The icing on this marketing cake is then: "and there's no recycle time". They managed to convince everyone it's a flash, and then point out it has none of the disadvantages of a flash. Genius. The lie of omission is, of course, that it has none of the advantages of flash either - no action freezing capability and a fraction of the light power.
 
Scooter said:
Rotolight? Yes they claim the light is 5 times brighter when it flashes. As long as you have it plugged into the mains.,,, On the batteries, it's a mere 2.5 times the continuous brightness. Oh, and those batteries? It takes 6 x AA's. In 2020. It's also £200. Two hundred actual Earth pounds. I have a Viltrox 116 t that is about the same brightness, is colour adjustable, and takes Sony NPF batteries (that power lights, cameras and other stuff in the movie industry). It's £30.
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Yes that pile of crap
 
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