I'm Tom Guiney, a gaffer, electrician and DP for fourteen years in New York City, and the owner/inventor of Airboxlights.com, your source for ultralight inflatable softboxes/diffusers for Litepanels.
This blog is intended as a co-blog to my twitter feed @airboxlights, where I put lighting tidbits up a few times a week, sharing my lighting work experience in the world of commercials, on-air promos, reality shows, corporate videos, movies, tv shows, and music videos.
Expansion on recent tweet:
tidbit: Underused light- molebeam beam projector. Powerful defined tungsten beam. Hard model key? window light? like a tungst xenon.
Here's a link: http://www.mole.com/lighting/beams/tun_beam/tung_beam.html
Have you used them? They are awesome! They put out a powerful super-refined beam with very distinct edges. Useful in some of the same ways a leko is, except for when you need more than 750 watts, the maximum size HPL lamp. Molebeams come in 2k, 5k, 10k, and 20k.
A molebeam is great when you need something like a shaft of light effect, but you're in a tungsten lighting situation. A bit like a xenon, but without a lot of the obvious problems of xenons, like unreliability, the hole in the middle of the beam (on older ones), and being unable to unplug them in a hurry for fear of exploding bulbs.
Also very useful to bounce into a board that's rigged up and behind the subject. If it's too much hassle/time/logistical difficulty to actually rig a backlight, you can generally rig up a piece of silver/white beadboard there, with tape if nothing else, and then hit it with a leko or a molebeam, since they don't really spill the way a fresnel does and won't require any gripping to keep spill off of the front of your subject.
Also useful just as tungsten source to use as a bounce source for key/fill/wherever, not rigged; it's still a 2k/5k/10k/20k.
Useful for creating crisply-defined shadows as well.
You can always soften a very hard source, but you can't harden a mushy source. Try casting a crisp shadow with a kino, tell me how that goes.
yours
Tom Guiney, gaffer and DP
Airboxlights.com inflatable LED diffusers for Litepanels
twitter lighting tips @airboxlights
