Having light is critical for photography, but what about the quality of light? Our resident mad scientist, Don Komarechka, explains how different light sources can impact your photos.
I keep a case of old style 60 watt incandescent bulbs in the trunk of my car for real estates shoots. Many people just plug in whatever bulb they have and it causes havoc with color. Why this guy didn't even mention regular old bulbs is weird. CFL bulbs are horrid.
I used to carry 250W daylight balanced bulbs for the same purpose. I plugged some of the lights into remote control X10 dimmer switches so that I could adjust The brightness and only have them on when I was actually exposing the film (They only had a 6 hour lifespan as I recall and I didn't want to overheat and burn the lampshades.) I needed bright light because I was shooting 4x5 or 6x9cm and needed F16-F22 typically.
But now when I mix windowlight and strobes with room lights, which seem to be mostly some kind of low quality warm LEDs, is I use a color slider in my RAW converter to de saturate some of that yellow. It is much faster and easier and my clients expect more shots in a day now than they did 20 years ago.
This is a good place to start, but I feel like it's too short. I'd love a full director's/scientist's cut with more information and more sources. But still, what a neat video.
The medium (video clips) imposes limits and I think that clip was just right. It is intended for beginners and casual users. Anything beyond a simple introduction immediately becomes entangled in sophisticated concepts that require prior knowledge and understandings that cannot be conveyed as infotainment.
If the material is new to you then that clip is a good introduction. If it interests you further then study up!
Actually, I very much enjoy YouTube videos being concise and to the point.
There are just too many YouTubers out there (Chris and Jordan explicitly not included!) that keep rambling on and on and on just to get more ad revenue for a longer video. Most of them could have brought their message across in 2-3 minutes rather than the 15-25 they usually keep talking.
If as the video says, "CFL tricks human eyes and makes objects look like having real colors", why photos taken under CFL cannot trick human eyes for the same? I mean: When I look at photos taken under CFL, I can tell certain colors are lost, even after white balanced.
Yes if you can do something to standardize your vision in some situations and you can see differences. Like have a large sheet of light grey paper and aim a tungsten bulb and a daylight bulb at each side of it. But color is still being interpreted by your brain and it is pretty hard to calibrate it.
This is an extremely complex subject once you go beyond scratching the surface.
When I was a student we had this example in our color class. Everyone watched a slide show in a darkened room. What we didn't know was as the slides progressed they were accompanied by steadily warming filters.
In the end they presented the first image... very blue and the last image ... very warm and we understood how our brain compensated because we had no "calibration" reference.
When you look at an image on a monitor, or at a print, your brain calibrates your vision to your surroundings as a reference. If you work on your computer in a darkened room color adjustment will be tricky.
I was "scanning" my old slides with DSLR and a CFL bulb. It seems now that CFL is the worst possible choice. Should I use halogen bulb, like a popular PAR20 ? I avoided them because they looked a bit yellow to me when compared to white CFL. I know that I can test myself but I would like to hear some light theory . Thanks.
Yes you should have used a halogen. Yes the halogen is a lot yellower: but you can fix that straightforwardly with the white balance on your camera (photograph a grey card with the halogen, use the white balance dropper to correct, and now you know the correct settings for your "scans" Using the CFL, but there will be colour errors that you cannot fix with the white balance tool.
I copied a bunch of old slides using an LED for focus and framing, and a flash for exposure. Electronic flash has a continuous spectrum and colour temperature close to that of the Sun. Kodak Ektachrome colours had survived far better than Agfa on these 60 year old slides, but none were unchanged by time depite being stored in darkness for most of their lives.
Halogen bulbs work well for "scanning" slides and film with a camera. However they get very hot and are easily broken if bumped while on. Electronic flash is another good source, You can mount it on the camera and bounce the light off of a white card. You may need to turn the output down when working at close range. AE with flash may be problematic.
I get good and consistent results using LED "replacement" bulbs in a desk lamp. These bulbs use a UV LED to excite a phosphor. The spectrum is very smooth, and the slow decay of the phosphor eliminates flicker and banding caused by direct LED operation.
CFL (fluorescent lamp) uses mercury vapor for excitation, which has strong lines in the spectrum extending to the UV. A UV LED has a mooth "bump" at 480 microns
If you really want some fun, you should talk about brown. It doesn't really exist, its just dark orange. So displaying brown on a back lite monitor is fun as its dark orange and really tricky.
We need to name more darks and wrap around colors.
There is some sense of using an underground parking lot that still has florescent lighting, if you want the scene to feel authentic, that those weird colors are adding to the grungy feel of the scene that you are capturing.
I did! Just didn't make the video cut. Xenon is a very even light source through the visible spectrum - and might be one of the reasons why it's used in strobes. It has some faint spectral lines that don't have a noticeable impact on anything we see - though it does have more pronounced spectral lines in the infrared spectrum... not that anyone really cares about that though. :)
Strobe light is created by superheating the gas, a mixture of Xenon and other inert gases. The flash is initiated by forming a plasma, which has a line spectrum. That's one reason the color shifts at lower outputs, which are done by quenching the flash.
I've been in the photocopier business for 40 years. I carry a pocket chart I got from the Flint group that has a huge open question mark, with various shades of red and the question, which color is red? Then, when you open it, you'll see they are all the same "shade" of red, but on different stock. Some glossy, some matte, different brightness of white, some on color paper. It's just as important, when printing, to calibrate the PAPER you use, along with the ink. Some of my customers will say "it doesn't look the same on the screen, as it does when I print. Once you explain the difference between RGB transmitted light, versus CYM(K) printed reflected light, they start to understand. Then explaining unless you have a fiery, coupled with a spectrometer/densitometer and do it all the time, it's never going to "look the same". Plus, color is something pretty much everyone sees differently. I grew up working in a tv shop, and people always saw color differently.
That's exactly why I used an i1iSis 2 XL to calibrate the printer before making my tests. :) Many people don't think it's as important as it is! And even when calibrated, the paper stock still makes a significant difference. The back wall of my office is littered with dozens of rolls of different papers for different purposes.
Photographic color charts are usually matte finished with a very specular reflectance. Standard grey charts also have matte patches, with one glossy black panel for comparison.
High quality color charts are also made using pigments like paint, rather than a printing process.
As an architectural photographer who has been shooting interiors for 40+ years, the variety and quality of indoor lighting has been the biggest challenge. Back when shooting 4x5 transparencies this required a lot of testing, filters, and special techniques... especially complicated in mixed lighting situations and when adding supplementary light.
Digital photography has made this much easier due to the control in post. But I still find it very common that rooms lit with warm LEDs will not have what I consider a "good enough" quality of light to give more than generally drab color results. This is especially noticeable now when most of the spaces I see tend to be very pale or neutral to begin with. It is so hard to recover from this deficiency that I sometimes have to paint in colors on furniture and walls to make them look closer to the subject if I can't light the overall scene with my strobes.
Thanks. Yes I studied color science and human vision as part of my course at RIT. But applying it to shooting unforgiving transparency film under a range of lighting was extremely challenging. That kind of photography was more like a science project each time than photographic art. Sometimes there were many steps to make a single exposure...
Beyond the color science was the limitations of the film medium itself... color and density shifts as exposure time changes, every film type having its own unique interpretation of color. Every batch of film needing testing.
All of this is still very useful for shooting digitally but it is way easier now.
Typical shot in an office space at 3AM when my brain is well past its prime:
Shoot image for 15 seconds with specific room lights on and a filter on the lens. Turn off those lights and send assistant into room with ladder to remove the two "security bulbs" that can't be shut off. Use broom to sweep up marks he made in the carpet. Carefully remove filter, connect shutter to strobes, take a frame using those lights. (I had self cocking shutters of course.) Sometimes we would put filters over the bulbs in the ceiling or over windows.
Repeat this process for about 10 frames of film or so for bracketing and backup to hold from the lab. We also had to cover all exit lights with material that matched the wall or ceiling. (Clients hated seeing these.)
I owned every Wratten filter in 4 and 3 inch for front and back of the lens plus a lot of glass filters. (I still have them.) I had holders that let me add or remove a filter without moving the camera.
It seemed normal for me to be hired to shoot large projects. Moving the gear over these spaces was a hassle.
There are good back stories to some of these photos. Mobil was on a large wooded campus with high security. They told me the boardroom was bombproof and the doors were vault like. Spouses of workers were not even allowed to visit. Everything coming in was x rayed and inspected. I was illustrating how the security was blended with the architecture as part of the assignment.
Amazingly we spent a few days there rolling ten + cases of gear onto site and they never inspected anything. Over the weekend a car raced through the site and threw a brick through the entrance window.
Another one was shooting a fancy hotel lobby late at night and watching the expressions on the "escorts" faces when they exited the elevator and had to cross over an area with 10,000 watts of lights on them.
Hah - how about this one for you: no colours are real. They are just our brain's way of interpreting the electromagnetic spectrum. Effectively, colours exist only inside your own mind. :)
The one I love to say to people, especially outdoors, is what color is the grass? Green? Nope, it's every color BUT green. All the colors of light are absorbed, BUT green is reflected, which is why we perceived it as green. ;)
PDL, magenta is a "metamer", of which many exist but in this case you cannot find a corresponding response in the normal visible spectrum. Look up the term and get ready for some head-scratching reading... but your magenta light in your enlarger is made of two distinct wavelengths of light being emitted at the same time. All colours are dependent on human perception more than we realize in our everyday lives.
Magenta makes it a closed loop and not a line! From a philosophical perspective (and maybe I'm pushing too hard here), it makes sense that we perceive a complete "whole" of the world around us, oblivious to the fact that we have a beginning and an end to our ability to see the electromagnetic spectrum.
Don, With due respect a dichroic head on a color enlarger does not have a "magenta" light. The lamp is halogen and the filters are thin layers of metal (I don't know what type) evaporated over optical glass.
I would imagine that Cyan is also a metamer but if you look at a common color wheel - there they are. You can even buy filters that are Magenta, so to say "it does not exist" is not valid. If you say it does not exist in the spectral response of light sources, then yes what you state is true. So lets not talk about other "colors" that do not exist when using the spectrograph - like Brown, Orange or Puse. 😁
To say any colour does not exist is valid, since every colour is a creation of our minds and isn't seen the same way by other creatures - but I digress. We're strange beings when it comes to perceiving light - and the senses only get stranger with smell and taste. We've developed tools in the visual space to define "beauty" to our eyes just as we've refined the culinary experience to be delicious to our tastes.
I'm going a little overboard there, I know. I agree with you. Maybe I should do another video on metamers in the future. I remember some old graphics cards actually had a dedicated "brown circuit" to handle some of those colours!
Incandescent bulbs actually score pretty high but since the world is moving toward being green, LEDs are replacing most. Just better energy efficiency. color temp, sure get the more neutral version not warm or cool.
Personally I prefer cloudy Seattle days. Yes, the cloud does block a percentage of some light spectrum like UV. You don't get all the high saturation colors nor harsh shadow.
Yeah, I live in Seattle and I love shooting on overcast days. Everything looks nice and even, and with less contrast range I am able to naturally get a saturated result easier in post.
CRI index is an OK guide for lighting quality, but it is only defined by certain colour patches. This means there is still the potential for significant spikes or dropouts in the spectrum to be present even with a high CRI. This is the case for many compact fluorescent bulbs which are marketed as having a CRI well over 90.
The only way to be really sure of the lighting quality is to look at the spectral plots.
@Photo Pete — This is an important point especially in Fine Art reproduction and product photography. High quality LED lights excel in reproducing blues and especially the most difficult of colors – purple. And guess what else? ... fluorescent (Dayglow) paint – particularly the ubiquitous “safety yellow-green” that is popular. The best ones are superior to flash or halogen at that blue-violet end of the spectrum and for cyan. The only way to evaluate them in advance is with spectrographs.
@Leonp, Huh? Spectrum is made up of both Color Temperature and CRI.
The color temperature of the flame of a match is very different from noonday sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature If you don't understand color temperature you will have a hard time working with mixed lighting.
CRI is important because not all LEDs are created equal. https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/color-rendering-index-leds/ There is a huge difference between a cheap LED and an expensive Extended CRI LED used for photography. Do you understand the concept of *discontinuous spectrum?* That is what CRI addresses.
I meant that photons (or wavelength quants or whatever it's called) jumping from your object, trough the lens on your sensor or film is what's physically happening. Those photons don't know about eachother and don't influence eachother. We can (almost literally) count these quants using the camera sensor. Every way of dealing with these data after just counting is a man made thing, and IMHO can sometimes get confusingly complicated.
If I ever have access to a comprehensive set of high-end strobes and LED light banks, and a Sekonic Spectromaster, I'd consider that in the future. :)
This was not a "product review" video, just opening the doors with some general information that everyone - regardless of previous knowledge or use case - would find helpful. Glad you found it informative on that level!
Thanks Don, this was informative. As for future articles, how about one regarding the quality of light's "diffuseness" (I'm sure there is a better term for it though what i mean is the range from point-source (like on a clear sunny day) to entirely diffuse as on overcast days). There's a huge impact on contrast for sure and a little impact on color, but are there any other effects?
Bernd and Hilla Becher would always shoot in the diffuse light produced by overcast and that gave their photos detail and consistency. I started out on the other end of the scale shooting in clear days (which are common where I live), resulting in very contrasty photos. Lately I've come to prefer a thin veil of cloud to produce less contrasty images while retaining bold colors.
100& cloudy days is basically a softbox. Clouds also can block some UV and produce less saturation, as it blocks out part of the light spectrum (mostly warmth). Plus less harsh shadow on portraits (unless you are going for a hard edge look). You would need to be a strobist with a softbox shooting on sunny 16 days. This is more noticalbe for portraits as you can see the skin tone by time of the day, cloudiness, indoor vs outdoor.
@thielges, quality of light is a vast and complicated subject. Light bounced off of a white plaster wall is very different than light bounced off of Foamcore or Griffolyn—I prefer bead board https://www.filmtools.com/1beadboard.html
Lighting through silk is popular—choosing white China silk or white artificial silk make a difference in the light quality. Then there is also black silk 8-)
Don, now that you’ve touched on illuminants you should also touch on metamers. As you know, metamers occur as cameras record different colors for the same subject under different illuminants. Extra points if you actually identify some cameras that generate fewer metameric failures when exposed under a variety of illuminants.
Colour science at its finest, yes! However, we're going for a somewhat generalized audience and that topic is WAY down the rabbit hole. We might get there eventually, I personally think it would be a fun topic but I'm not sure there would be a broad enough appeal. I love the fact that our eyes can see two identically coloured objects that reflect entirely different wavelengths of light... human perception is a deep topic and it's hard for technology to mimic everything perfectly.
Nice video thanks! One thing that has been on my mind is that some old lenses with Thorium elements yellow over time. And to get them back to normal one exposes them to UV-light for some time. When put in a window it can take a very long time but if one uses the Ikea LED lamp Jansjö it only takes a few days. This makes me wonder why that light which is made for home use has so much UV in it and how good that is for our eyes. And also if other LED-lights bursts out so high amounts of UV-lights.
Fun fact! "White" LEDs are actually UV LEDs that use phosphors to "transform" (I'm oversimplifying - I know this has to do with electron excitation followed by orbital decay) ultraviolet light into visible light. If the light isn't shielded to prevent any excess UV light created by the diode from escaping, you'll have a light that can "fix" thorium glass quicker than it should.
Thanks for the good and interesting technical explanation, but what I really wonder is how good the leaking UV-light is and if the Jansjö lamp is an exception or if it is common that LED lights for home use bursts out high amounts of UV.
You can do a simple test with a sheet of white printer paper. That paper is designed with optical whitening agents that essentially fluoresce under UV light - which is also the reason why this paper appears bluish when placed outdoors on neutrally-white snow.
If the paper appears brighter under one light source, that means the light emits more UV light. This is also the reason why I favour printing my photos on high quality papers that do not use optical brightening agents - the "look" of the image may change more drastically than one would otherwise anticipate based on the lighting conditions. They also decay over time.
The Jansjö lamp from IKEA was chosen because it was the first reasonably priced, easily available LED lamp available in the U.S -not for any unusual properties it possessed.
The whitener in Resin Coated paper was Titanium Dioxide which is a common whitener used in papers and plastics. That is why prints fluoresce under UV light.
"Soon oh soon the light Pass within and soothe the endless night And wait here for you Our reason to be here. Soon oh soon the light Ours to shape for all time, ours the right The sun will lead us Our reason to be here" (YES)
I am colorblind. I see colors, plenty of colors, but I do not see them normally. (I did not see the 71 in your example.) I was wondering about glasses that are supposed to compensate for or correct colorblindness
I believe the best ones are from a company called EnChroma. There are many different types (and intensities) of colourblindness. From what I understand, the glasses modify the transmission of light such that wavelengths that your eyes are less sensitive to will pass through nearly 100%, but those that your eyes are strongly sensitive to will be cut down, effectively "rebalancing" the light for your vision. I'm sure there's a lot more science to it than just this, but you might want to explore a pair of those glasses.
An histogram of the luminance would put numbers on the quality of the spectrum, without resorting to a spectrophotometer. Any variations in intensity would show up as bumps on the curve, and those bumps often make the difference between usable and unusable sources.
Diffraction gratings are not all the same either. They are often cut so that certain wavelengths are emphasized, a process called "blazing". While this might shift the curve, the bumps, if any, would remain.
A scientific spectrometer that could more precisely measure the light over a range of wavelengths wouldn’t have substantially added to the effectiveness of the video.
The point of the video is made and is made clearly.
Okay but this wasn’t intended to be a scientific comparison of the quality of different manufacturers bulbs. And the $15 spectrometer that they can take a photo of gets the point across to the non-scientific community much better than a calibrated chart on an optical spectrum analyzer.
Not all LEDs are the same. Compact versions may use a combination of red, green and blue LEDs to simulate white light, but tend to have gaps in the overall spectrum. LED replacement bulbs for home use may be surprisingly good. Rather than discrete bulbs, they us a UV LED to stimulate a phosphor.
The color distribution is very smooth, similar to incandescent light, with a bump at 480 microns (the excitation source). I can calibrate using a standard color chart (Gretag-MacBeth) accurately, with relatively small deviations in the curves. An added feature is the long decay time of the phosphor eliminates the banding you see due to line frequency. There are LED lamps with better accuracy (CRI), but they're expensive, while the household versions are cheap and effective.
You're absolutely right - I have one that changes colours that does this - I used it for the colourblind test that turned green. The "white" light was very inferior to a true "white" LED that actually emits ultraviolet light, as you mention.
I've noticed that the blues are diminished even in my highest quality LED examples I have. The NiteCore TM03 CRI light is the best I currently have here, and it's still not quite as good as halogen... but good enough for my purposes. And they're only going to get better/cheaper over time.
I would like to see some comparison of image noise in low light when different types of lights are used. From my experience, I suspect shooting under fluorescent lights makes the photos more noisy and the noise uglier. Maybe because ther isn't enough green light to feed the RGGB CFA on our sensors.
That is correct. Perhaps the header should not have been: "The quality of light, and how different types of lights affect your photos" But instead: "The quality of light in certain types of artificial light sources"
Incandescent lights are still the cheapest and highest quality light there is, if daylight is not enough. LED quality can be anything, but there are some very high quality LEDs like Nichia Optisolis and SmartEcoLightning. Lamps which use these are limited and pretty much special products for now. High quality LEDs eat more power, but still much lower compared to incandescents.
Incandescent bulbs have been forced into obsolescence bcause they use too much electricity, which is "bad for the environment" (ignoring how the electricity is generated). Fluroescent bulbs are "good" because they use less electricity for the same amount of light, but each bulb contains a few milligrams of metallic mercury. That's the difference between real science and "settled" science.
It would also be interesting to see how sensors of different manufacturers, with their corresponding "color science", render the rainbows from the same continuous spectrum light source.
Another factor is the color rendition of the lens. The International Standards Organization introduced standard #6728, called: “Determination of ISO color contribution index” (ISO/CCI) in 1983. See Leica M-Lenses, Their soul and secrets by Erwin Puts, 2002 page 18.
You're right - different materials will transmit light to different degrees. A great example is the previous video I did with a lens made of all quartz glass that transmitted more UV light compared to "regular" glass. Coatings, optical design, and material choices all have an affect on the final "balance" of light before it hits the camera sensor.
@Leonp says "A lens doesn't render color, it transmits, or doesn't. But it would be interesting."
With the introduction of mirrorless cameras, nearly any lens can be mounted and compared directly with other lenses. I have done that using lenses I've accumulated over the years, and there is a night and day difference between lenses, even by the same manufacturer. I cite Leica lenses as the worst "offenders" in that regard.
David, I just found this myself last night! I was curious about the light transmittance (T-stop, as it were) of my new 16-55mm 2.8, versus the 16mm, 30mm, and 56mm primes it's replacing. Turns out the zoom lens actually transmits more light for the same aperture setting, which I really didn't expect. Also, the zoom lens had a more green cast, while the primes all had a slightly more magenta cast! (Lenses were the Sony E 16-55mm 2.8G and the trio of Sigma 1.4 primes)
EDIT: Forgot to mention, I shot the test pictures with flash, using a neutral gray card.
A lens does modify the color balance. A modern camera lens can have up to 15 elements, often using different types of glasses. Different glasses have different transmission profiles transmitting and absorbing light in a no nonuniform manner which affects the transmitted color balance. Each element is also optically coated to maximize light throughout. These coatings also affect the color balance as well. Typically, lens color balance is referred to as either being warmer or cooler in color in terms of the final image..
For sure! You also have other fun things that can cause different absorption by the lens, like the radioactive decay of the Thorium in throium-oxide glass. I had an old Olympus 55mm 1.2 lens, with a thorite front element, and over the years the front element had become very brown. It ended up letting in about the same amount of light, at 1.2, as a different lens stopped down to 2.8.
The minerals in the glass, the coatings used, everything removes fidelity and each lens is slightly different which I prefer as a certain vintage/brand/type has a certain character.
I really like Don's videos. They are informative, and and the way he speaks is very clear. He could even make interesting ,long TV documents about various scientific subjects.
It depends on the bulb. Florescent are usually poor, but there are good ($$$) ones. It depends on the coating.
That said, it's hard to buy good ones.
I bought "high-CRI" fluorescent bulbs from B&H. My photos didn't improve. It wasn't until years later that I learned B&H had sold my knock-off low-CRI florescent bulbs at a high-CRI price.
When I switched to cheap LED bulbs, my photos got better. I looked at both with a spectrograph, and I learned I got scammed.
I believe quality of light is important in the natural world as well. Not all light is created equal when you consider atmospherics, surface reflections and filtering through branches, etc. A High ISO image captured in "good" quality light can be perceived as acceptable compared to an image captured with the same metered settings in "poor" quality of light. Just an opinion.
Yep! Keep in mind that noise is actually a function of the amount of light, not purely the camera's ISO setting! There's another article somewhere here on DPR that goes more in-depth on it.
Well, It can't for a great part. If part of the spectrum is missing in the lightsource, and the object photografied (spelling?) does or does not reflect that specific part of the spectral light, there is no way a camera can know this, so there is no way of correction other than try, error, learn and try better, maybe using a human mind or otherwise using a smart algorithm, both things eventually being the same.
Some objects may, for the human eye in sunlight, appear to have the exact same color. Those same objects might differ in color in other lightsources. Secondly, if you take a photo of these objects, even in sunlight, they may appear having a different color on the picture, due to differences in the exact responsiveness of the camera to specific colors in the spectrum, in comparison to the resposiveness of the human eye to those specific colors of the spectrum. (Let alone when you take a photo of these specific objects using a fluorescent light source.) If you ever have done some photography on military stuff you may know that not everything that appears to have the same hue of military green necessarily has the same color in the pictures. Flowers are famous for this effect too. (also the colors of flowers are in many times so saturated they fall out of the camera's color gamut, but that's a different effect)
Rather than correcting the colors, it would be interesting to test how good they are at capturing the different spectrums, since the sensor's bayer filter and the sensor itself won't have the same response to every red or every green in the picture.
That would be interesting Txoni. You have to realise however, that every camera as far as I understand already as quite an amount of corrections even before saving the result als a rawfile. I've read things about those corrections and soon concluded to better stop reading, make photo's and correct them to a point where I like them* as long as I don't work for a museum or so.
*: on my calibrated screen that kind of resembles the screens of the people that look at my pictures.
You're possibly right, as the camera can try to flatten the response in software. However, I'm pretty sure the light source will then have an impact on the noise levels, due to the additional digital gain.
Using the Color Checker Passport to try and give the most optimal response for corrected colour and it still couldn't match things properly, as Leonp suggests this is because the light source isn't emitting the frequency of light required to reflect off the subject, pass through the lens, and be detected by the sensor.
You can get closer to "reality", but it all starts with a good light source.
The place that had the most complex color temps that I have ever shot in, was the Cafeteria at a company I worked for.
Halogen, flourecent, Tungsten, Daylight and Mercury Vapor with some added in Infrared heat lamps in the backgrounds. Some of the blue smocks worn by the technicians (static free) were a little weird. The skin tones were pretty challenging too.
This was interesting, thanks. The quality of artificial light is one very easily overlooked parameter. I've been shooting in a very basic studio with softboxes and fluorescent light bulbs and found the light quality to be mediocre at best. Low quality led lights have another issue: flickering. I have seen autofocus fail in instances where you would not expect, because of low quality lighting.
Interesting video. But halogen (just an incandescent with slightly higher color temperature: 3000K vs 2700K) indeed heve a very good continuous spectrum, but unevely divided. Much more red and less blue. I prefer good quality LEDs and sacrifice a bit continuity for better equality between red and blue. And indeed: CFLs (and fluorescent tubes) have a bad CRI (color rendering index), unless a high quality phosphor is used. Flickr is another issue: high quality LEDs have a high refresh rate in the kilohertz rate so they don't flicker, but cheapies have a notorious flickr. Even OLED screen are notorious. Phone manufacturers boasting with 120 Hz, but that is far too low to prevent flickr. But that is another issue.
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In our continuing series about each camera manufacturer's strengths and weakness, we turn our judgemental gaze to Leica. Cherished and derided in equal measure, what does Leica get right, and where can it improve?
A dental office, based in Germany, had a team of pilots create a mesmerizing FPV drone video to give prospective clients a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of their office.
Samsung has announced the ISOCELL HP3, a 200MP sensor with smaller pixels than Samsung's original HP1 sensor, resulting in an approximately 20 percent reduction in the size of the smartphone camera module.
Street photography enthusiast Rajat Srivastava was looking for a 75mm prime lens for his Leica M3. He found a rare SOM Berthiot cinema lens that had been converted from C mount to M mount, and after a day out shooting, Srivastava was hooked.
The lens comes in at an incredibly reasonable price point, complete with a stepping motor autofocus system and an onboard Micro USB port for updating firmware.
The new version of the Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K brings it much closer to the 6K Pro model, with the same battery, EVF but a new rear screen. New firmware for the whole PPC series brings enhanced image stabilization for Resolve users
The OM System 12-40mm F2.8 PRO II is an updated version of one of our favorite Olympus zoom lenses. Check out this ensemble gallery from our team, stretching from Washington's North Cascades National Park to rural England, to see how it performs.
The first preset, called 'Katen' or 'Summer Sky,' is designed to accentuate the summer weather for Pentax K-1, K-1 Mark II and K-3 Mark III DSLR cameras with the HD Pentax-D FA 21mm F2.4 ED Limited DC WR and HD Pentax-DA 15mm F4 ED AL Limited lenses attached.
As we continue to update our Buying Guides with the cameras we've recently reviewed, we've selected the Sony a7 IV as our pick for the best video camera for photographers. It's not the best video camera we've tested but it offers the strongest balance of video and stills capabilities.
For the next several weeks, many observers will be able to see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the predawn sky with the naked eye. Of course, a camera with a telephoto lens or telescope attached will get you an even closer look.
The June 2022 Premiere Pro update adds a collection of new and improved features and performance upgrades, including a new Vertical Video workspace, improved H.264/HEVC encoding on Apple silicon and more.
Researchers at NVIDIA have created a new inverse rendering pipeline, 3D MoMa. It turns a series of images of a 2D object into a 3D object built upon a triangular mesh, allowing it to be used with a wide range of modeling tools and engines.
Light Lens Lab is a rather obscure optics company, but their manual lenses for Leica M-mount camera systems tend to offer a unique aesthetic at what usually ends up being reasonable price points.
We've updated our 'around $2000' buying guide, to include cameras such as the Sony a7 IV and OM System OM-1. We've concluded that the Sony does enough to edge-out our previous pick, the Canon EOS R6.
This compact shotgun microphone will convert the analog audio signal to digital internally before sending it as a digital signal to compatible MI Shoe cameras, such as the ZV-E10 and a7C.
In addition to the Amber and Blue versions, which give flares and highlights warm and cool tones, respectively, the new Silver Nanomorph option offers a more neutral flare that changes with the color temperature of the lights being used.
The organizers of the Bird Photographer of the Year competition have revealed the top finalists, showcasing the incredible photography of avian photographers from around the globe.
Both the 27" and 32" models use a 3,840 x 2,160 pixel IPS LCD panel that offers 98% DCI-P3 coverage and Pantone validation for accurate color representation.
A very special Leica camera just became the most expensive ever sold. Chris and Jordan were in Germany for the auction, and to tell you why this particular camera is so special.
As part of any mission to Mars, there will be garbage and discarded components. The Perseverance rover recently spotted a piece of trash, a bit of shiny thermal blanket. It's believed to be from Perseverance's landing operation, but it's not clear how it ended up where it did on the red planet.
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