Custom Catch Lights or Eye Lights

Lighting Exercise: Custom Catchlights

I've always had this thing for unusual catch lights in people eyes, something other than the usual rectangle or dot.  Catchlights, also referred to as eyelights, are generally understood by photographers and videographers to be important; people's eyes seem a little dead when there's no light reflected in them. Not coincidentally, the times there's no light reflected in someone eyes is usually when there isn't any light source in front of them, so they're usually a bit backlit or sidelit anyway, which might lead people to feel that the person looks a little gloomy. 


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Make women look beautiful!

This is proof, right?  That Airbox Inflatable Softboxes transform women from haggard to gorgeous in under 30 seconds!

 Exaggerations aside, Airboxes do work. And I hope people agree with me at NAB 2014, where I've got my own booth this year.  Exciting.  Expensive.  Wish me luck.

Laryngitis at a trade show...

Airboxlights.com At Photo plus, big NYC trade show. Lost my voice! Pretty useless. You know how hard it is to give a sales pitch using gestures only? Fortunately, I had my handy sales video that I could point to.  And my cool Inflate-O-Matic(see below).

Anyway, b&h is doing a show special on Airbox products til the 27th! 

Some redemption codes for you:

1507446759165600

1507446733561900

1507446744501190

1507446729414320

At least I have my sales video to speak for me- http://vimeo.com/60720449

And cool inflate-o-matic to show people they're inflatable!

Inflato-video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbdj8GXmopo

Micro Grip and Lighting Kit

Sometimes I get this notion like I've got all the answers on something, an of course that means I don't. I got my eyes opened a bit on how small you can go with gear and still be very effecive. This is particularly relevant when you're working by yourself or with a very small crew. I gaffed a Chrome spot for a dp named Norman Bonney, and he had a whole kit of totally miniaturized gear, optimized for fitting in one vehicle and for taking on airplanes.
Kit was
1 case: 4 LEDs, 2 1x1 panels and two 6" x1' panels
4 skinny little 18/3 "stingers"
A bag of slender aluminum stands, of a degree of sturdiness that I had previously dismissed as Mickey-mouse student film stuff. Some stands were 3/8" studs at the top, some were standard 5/8" studs.
Portable fold-up flag kit
Collapsible 4x6 westcott scrimjim frames and a duffel bag full of soft goods.
Instead of heavy duveteen, he carried lightweight ripstop nylon
And the grip kit: instead of heavy steel 2 1/2" steel gobo heads, these tiny little 1 1/2" grip heads. So this is what your "C-stand" looks like:

A tiny stand, a tiny head, and a tiny cardi. Slender, but big enough to handle this lightweight collapsible 4x frame on an interior set:

And all the bags and cases were 49 lbs or less and less than 62" long, making it all air-travel ready.

I dig it!  I shoot a bunch of little jobs where it's basically just me, and if everything fit in bags and cases and didn't weight all that much, that would be just fine with me.

Handy items in my kit as far as extreme portability are the inflatable softboxes I make to go with my LED lights.  They just squish down on top of the lights in the case and add barely any weight or bulk since they're inflatable. Also handy are these cheesy "Impact" brand light stands that I got a while ago and then regretted because they seemed so flimsy.  They've proved really reliable, even if they are lightweight. They work.  When I'm not bringing "any" lights, I bring my two 1x1 panels in their laptop bags and these two lightweight stands and my little briefcase of small LED units and Airbox softboxes.  

Trivium: "Impact" is one of B&H's house brands of gear, along with Pearstone and probably a few others.

Hi-speed shooting, tungsten filaments, and flicker/pulse

Tweeted on the topic of high- fps shooting today.  More info here:

It is commonly understood that when you're shooting above 120 fps, you can't use small lights, that a 5k is the smallest light that you can use.  Why? In brief, because a smaller, thinner filament can cool and therefore dim quickly, as the AC voltage cycles up and down 60 times per second on a 60-hz system.  To the eye, and a normal framerate, the very brief dim period of out put in between +120volts and -120volts that happens 60 times each second isn't visible at all, the same way you can't see hummingbird wings or helicopter blades.  When you're shooting extremely high speed, these "brief" dim periods are extremely obvious, and the lights that appear steady to your eye appear to be pulsing in a very odd way.  With larger, thicker filaments, like on a 10k or 20k, it takes a much longer time for the heat and light to dissipate out of the metal, and by the time the filament would be noticeably darker, the voltage has already reached it's next peak and the brightness of the filament is restored.

Today it was pointed out to me by a DP I'm about to work with that the "nothing under 5k" rule is actually a conservative overcompensation(a little typical of us gaffers and electricians, I think).  I've pulled maxibrutes (9 x 1k Par-64 bulbs) off of an order because I heard that we were adding a bit of high speed.  Jim Matlosz (Www.dpmatlosz.com) clearly knows what he's doing, if you look at his site, and he said, "Yeah, you get away with it sometimes. 1ks?  Yeah. I've seen them flicker, and I've seen them not. We'll try it." But in any case, he firmly asserted that 2k is the safe smallish light, not 5k.  

Regular tube-shaped kinos are fine when they're bright enough, because kino ballasts ramp up the frequency of the current to about 10,000 hz.  Interestingly, the u-shaped kinos like diva lights, parabeams, and vistabeams are problematic sometimes.  That requires further research; I don't know why they aren't fine and the straight tubes are.  They must use lower-frequency ballasts.

"Flicker-free" HMIs:- those arent really flicker free.  Their brightness still increases and decreases 60 times per second, but they become "flicker-free" by squaring off the top of the AC sine wave.  The amplitude(height) of the wave is increased, but a filter is applied that cuts off the top of the wave beyond a certain point, which gives you an almost completely flat-topped, steep-sided waveform, almost a true square wave.  This results in seeing the maximum brightness for a relatively longer time out of each cycle and having the transition between brightness peaks be relatively brief.

In any case, don't use flicker free HMIs at a framerate higher than 150 fps. Some people say 120, but that might be just staying on the safe side.

yours
Tom Guiney, gaffer and DP
Airboxlights.com inflatable LED diffusers for Litepanels
twitter lighting tips @airboxlights

Expansion @airboxlights twitter feed of lighting tips, tricks, and opinions

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