Hey guys, my name is Adam.
I work with DC Camera and we decided to have our first discussion today on LEDs.
The first thing that comes to mind for me with LEDs are the mobility of them.
And why are they so mobile?
Well because they require a lot less energy.
So why is it so important to be mobile?
Chances are you're not going to have this beautiful little studio setting where you
can put up five, six lights if you like when you're on a typical shoot.
So do you want to lug around all these lights or do you want to have a nice small package
of three, four lights that can all fit in one case, they're lightweight, they're battery
powered so you can move from one location to the next quickly.
You're going to light a lot more as a result.
The second most important thing would be probably longevity.
You're not dealing with filaments.
So with an LED it's going to last a lot longer and it can handle a lot more wear and tear.
Now I think LEDs kind of got a bad rap in the beginning because they were very limited
on temperature control and just the overall quality of light that was coming out of them.
One of the biggest complaints was it was kind of a greenish tone.
So that's kind of been taken care of with a lot of these new lights.
And one that we'll talk about is this new 1K that already is made that's, this one
that we have here is called an L7-C because you're able to change the temperature and
you're also able to change the hue, saturation, it's incredible what this one can do.
So we'll talk about that in a little bit.
So let's talk about some of the different LED lights that are around me right now.
What I'm holding in my hand is the first company that really started making a lot of these
LEDs for the industry and this one is light panels and probably the most mobile one that
we have.
It doesn't have a ton of output but it does have a dimmable control and you cannot change
the temperature on this one.
Now a lot of the other ones around me have gotten to a point that you can change hue,
saturation, pretty much dial in whatever you need temperature wise, which is pretty incredible.
And the other thing that's nice is they're all coming down in price.
I'm going to show you a little bit about the 1K real quick.
Right now we are about at 50% intensity.
So I'm going to just dial it back and you can see what the set looks like.
Now I'm going to dial it all the way up and that's that full power right there.
I want to take it back down to half, so we're at 56% right now, so there's a wide range
and now I'm going to mess with the saturation.
So you can actually bring out greens and bring out magentas and if I click one button, now
we are into hue.
Now you can really get crazy.
So I'm going to actually turn it up so you can really see it.
So this is drastic.
I mean this is like putting any gel you could possibly come up with between this and then
you can still also dial in saturation.
And you can see it's just a lot of possibilities.
What really interests me is let's find something that maybe we can have three or four of these
lights and they're smaller.
They run on battery, use one as a key, one as a fill, backlight something, maybe highlight
for example on this table.
Right now I'm using an actual tungsten light over there, but you know it would be nice
if I could have multiple lights so I can really start creating a dynamic scene.
Let me just grab this right off the stand and this is light panels, it's a one by one
T-flud.
Now this only does 3200K in terms of temperature so you can't dial that in, but you can see
you can adjust its intensity and flip it around since it's running on just a little
dionic which is made by Anton Bauer.
This isn't necessarily so much a highlight as it has a specific role in both photography
and filmmaking and it's called a ring light and I'm sure you've heard of it so let's
not pretend no one's heard of a ring light if you haven't, I'm not going to give you
the whole story about it, but I'll say this, this comes with a mount that you can put,
where is it, here we go, you can put your 15mm rods to it and it will basically go like
that.
So now your camera is set up and it's going to sit right there and usually you're going
to be using this for a scenario where you have a beautiful girl in front of you and
you just want her face to glow.
Powered by a dionic, these are made by Roscoe and I'm sure there's lots of them out there
and they call this a light pad.
These are great for hiding in, you know, under a bar if you want to just highlight something
like this table but you'd have to obviously do it in the proper way where it looks natural
but these are great for that.
Let's talk about this Celeb 200 up here, okay so there's presets on here, we've got daylight,
and that's a preset of 5K, preset of 4K, we're at tungsten at 3200 and down to 2700.
I can just scroll in a knob and just hand dial it into literally jumping by 2825, 2850
so you can dial it into whatever you want.
Let's actually click this one button back here, it says you can jump between what you're
dialing it in and also to the dimming so now we just bumped it up.
So there is your tremendous amount of difference, I had it way turned down, that's equal to
what seems to be about 750.
The funny thing is as of right now, not many people have rented this out to be honest with
you.
I rented it not long ago, I don't think anybody even realizes that it exists at this point
so I really wanted to point that one out because I love that light.
The topic of LEDs is kind of, to me, it hits upon a really important thing with filmmaking
and with all of this gear that we carry and that is to me each piece of gear has a direct
purpose and certain pieces of gear for me stand out because you start seeing, wow I'm
using this all the time and why?
Because it works, it does the job and it works.
We are going to be making a lot of these films so feel free to write in or contact us, you
can reach us at info at dc-camera.com and let us know what you want to hear about, topics,
reviews, anything, stay tuned.
