Lights, Strobes, and Lighting Technique / Archived topic
Started by jasonlandis ·
Read-only discussion
Has anyone had any experience lighting with LEDs ? I know a lot of new led lights are balanced to daylight so it seems that would be a huge advantage. Especially for macro work with snoots.
I just purchased some ds161's is the video light bright enough to shoot stills with?
No, this will not be enough light is most situations. If you have strobes you will be much better off using them. The LED's will do ok for Video, but I think they are a little underpowered on the 161's for my taste.
What about a more powerful light like the ikelite pro-2800 http://www.ikelite.com/web_pages/vpro2800.html
Video lights work up to 1/100-1/125 shutter speed faster shutter speeds result in blurred images
If you put a pair of 4000 lumens light on a macro subject you are likely to scar it as fish tolerate more the rapid pulse of a strobe then continuous light
From my experience, a 1400 lumen light is just right for macro video and photo. The 1400 lumen light can light up area up to 5 ft in front of you, yet for anything closer, you won't bind them as long as you don't point the light directly at them.
There is however a draw back to use video light for photo, that is you would burn through battery very fast. Battery for a strobe should last about 200+ photos, while if you have the video light on the whole time, it will last about 1 dive. Of course you can turn on the video light when you need to take photo to conserve battery, but then it could be a pain to turn the video light on and off so often, especially if you have a twist type video light.
In the non underwater world, a lot of photographers are leaving the old studio strobes behind and moving to LED panels. See Kirk Tuck (Visual Science Lab Blog) for details. I think that for many macro subjects you can get buy with relatively high powered LED lights instead of strobes if you take care with local white balance, but I think shooting at f:16 at 1/250 will need strobes.
BVA
Video lights change critters' behaviors a lot more than the flash of a strobe.
For what it's worth this was shot last year with a Sola 600 at full power and iso 800, balanced against ambient light in the English Channel:
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