Since LED lights started appearing on the market I’ve been trying to find a reason to buy some. Convenience is the only upside that I can justify LED use but for that a lot of quality must be sacrificed and quality is much more important to me than my convenience.
There was an area however that I always felt those conveniences would be very useful.
Since the NBA’s Orlando Magic last season run to the championship they’ve been getting a lot more than normal media coverage and I find myself doing considerably more courtside pre-and post game coverage than ever before. This is where I found LED lights very useful.
Lightweight, quick and easy to set up and most important we don’t have to worry about looking for those hard to find electrical outlets, they have self contained power via V mount batteries (I hate wires running across the floor). As a test I bought two of the least expensive that I could find, the Cool Lights, 2 lights for about $1100 and I got to use them for the first time on Xmas day game. They did the job and did it well.
The talent was about 6 feet from the camera and the lights with the supplied diffuser at F8 gave me enough power to create a good separation from the background while still maintaining the effect of the existing arena lights, actually I had to dim the LED down a little. Colors were also very close to the arena lights, I was getting a reading of 5200K and on the monitor I did not noticed any major problem. Under those conditions lighting is far from perfect anyway.
As a result I’m putting together a quick set up, totally wireless LED light kit for this sort of things. I just ordered two Zylights Z90 as on camera fill and one as back or hair light. I figure that with the color adjustment versatility of the Zylights I’ll be able to match whatever the larger LCD color output is. It should be 5600K but when they come with green correction filters you know that colors might be a bit off.
I’ll keep you posted.
There was an area however that I always felt those conveniences would be very useful.
Since the NBA’s Orlando Magic last season run to the championship they’ve been getting a lot more than normal media coverage and I find myself doing considerably more courtside pre-and post game coverage than ever before. This is where I found LED lights very useful.
Lightweight, quick and easy to set up and most important we don’t have to worry about looking for those hard to find electrical outlets, they have self contained power via V mount batteries (I hate wires running across the floor). As a test I bought two of the least expensive that I could find, the Cool Lights, 2 lights for about $1100 and I got to use them for the first time on Xmas day game. They did the job and did it well.
The talent was about 6 feet from the camera and the lights with the supplied diffuser at F8 gave me enough power to create a good separation from the background while still maintaining the effect of the existing arena lights, actually I had to dim the LED down a little. Colors were also very close to the arena lights, I was getting a reading of 5200K and on the monitor I did not noticed any major problem. Under those conditions lighting is far from perfect anyway.
As a result I’m putting together a quick set up, totally wireless LED light kit for this sort of things. I just ordered two Zylights Z90 as on camera fill and one as back or hair light. I figure that with the color adjustment versatility of the Zylights I’ll be able to match whatever the larger LCD color output is. It should be 5600K but when they come with green correction filters you know that colors might be a bit off.
I’ll keep you posted.
