Ever since I first hefted a camera onto my shoulder I’ve been using tungsten lights to fill in the dark areas and light up the night (as well as interviews). Tungsten seemed to be a fixture for both news and production…been around nearly forever.

But in the past twenty years there have been some pretenders and challengers…and one of them is serious enough that I’m considering bailing from my old standby and sliding over to the cool side of lighting.

Now my first thoughts of betrayal came with the introduction of fluorescent lights. Soft, portable. But I just couldn’t see the real advantages over tungsten. No real ability to control the light spread…really only good for flooding a scene.

Then LEDs came onto the scene…and I was cautious. I mean, they seemed kind of cute but not really a workhorse type of gear that I could use.

So I took the leap with a Flolight 256 and ran it through some tests. The light is bright and holds up against my Lowel Prolight with a 250w lamp pretty well. It’s daylight balanced, very light and runs for an hour or more on a Sony NP battery.

On the down side: not full color spectrum. Even with manual white balance the cast of human skin comes out bluish, so I did what any one with a bit of knowledge of the color wheel would do. I knew I wanted to warm up the image, so I experimented with some white cards with a bluish tint. Opposites do make for an attractive result – by white balancing with the LED light on the blue cards I was able to trick the camera into thinking it was pretty cool out there and the balance shifted to the warm side.

Voila!

I’ve upped my game and have three Flolights now – two 256s and a 128, all powered by battery. They’ve changed my workflow for sure. I no longer have to worry about cables snaking across the floor and can re-position lights in a snap. Using Blackwrap (heat-resistant heavy-duty photographic aluminum foil) I can even create snoots and other handy ways to control the light. And packing it all in at the end of the day…well, no wait time for the light heads to cool down. These little heads barely get warm after hours of use.

So LED lights: I thank you. But the talent and interview subjects I work with in these hot summer days thank you even more for making them the coolest things around.