Quartz Halogen Lights

Looking for an alternative to using studio flash for portrait and

still life shots, I've come across a range of low votage quartz

halogen lamps.

1. What affect will they have on colour balance (using both 35mm

colour and b&w and digital).

2. Are there any basic reasons why I should not use these types of

light sources?

3. Any info/experiences/ideas would be ggreatly appreciated

 

Regards

Andrew

1) The light color is quite yellow, but you can use a blue filter to get it back to daylight. This won't matter with B&W film, and the digital should have a white ballance option for "Tungsten" that should be close enough.

 

2) They are really not very bright, so you will have to use lots of them or very high wattage bulbs to get reasonable short shutter speeds. And they are hot. Your human subjects wil not like the heat and any animal subjects will not likely put up with it at all. Neither problem will matter for most still life shots.

 

3) I used several 500 watt Halogen lights from a hardware store, reflecting off of photographic umbrellas, with a blue filter on my camera. It worked well, but shutter speeds were around 1/15 seconds @ f/5.6 with 400 ISO film. A tripod was a must and people couldn't deal with the heat for very long. But it did work, and you can see what you're doing as you shoot. It was a great way to learn about lighting.

Andrew,

I bought a set of Hotlights and shot a few rolls......then I went out and bought a

Strobe like I should have in the first place :)

 

Check out www.alienbees.com for a good deal on good quality flashes.

 

jmp

For B&W still life, where you don't care about color balance

or long shutter speeds, they can be very useful. But for

portraiture, even the cheapest, smallest battery operated

flash units (Sunpak 383, Vivitar 283, Morris mini-slave,

etc.) will allow you to stop motion while using a smaller

aperture and/or slower film, all the while getting daylight-balanced

light and not frying your subjects. Of course, "real"

studio strobes with modelling lights are even more powerful

and useful. See <a href="http://webs.lanset.com/rcochran/flash/hotorstrobe.html">

http://webs.lanset.com/rcochran/flash/hotorstrobe.html</a> for

more details.

I've experimented with the same type of set-up as Jim, i.e. 500 W QI lamps from the local hardware store. But I found that I needed a 2 kW mainlight (yes, two kilowatts! - 4 x 500 watt lamps) and at least one 500 W for hair-light and/or fill. All of this in a room 12x18 feet with an 8 foot ceiling and the model was wilting within 20 minutes!

The Good

 

Hot Lamps do have one advantage - what you see is what you get wheras the modeling lamps on strobes isn't quite as precise.

 

The Bad

 

There's lots of bad -

 

The bulbs on the lamps don't last nearly as long as a good strobe tube making the operations more expensive.

 

Color balance is a big pain. Digital cameras' tungsten setting should be adequate to get a good image. 35mm is more annoying. They still make Tungsten balanced slide film but it's a very limited selection compared to other color slide films.

 

The effective brightness of most tungsten kits is no match to a set of strobes. You will likely have pretty slow shutter speeds. If you are using a blue filter to correct the tungsten lights then you lose additional light to the filter.

 

Melted Stuff

 

Hot lamps are well.... hot. They can and will melt things that get near them. The only time I've found this heat to not be a major burden is when working with a nude model. Beyond that the heat generally isn't helpful to the subject.