CFL Practicals

djkarn105

djkarn105

Well-known member
Anyone have advice on CFL Practicals and where to get daylight and tungsten balanced ones?

I'm shooting several night time interiors and was thinking that since I can put higher powered CFLs in the existing fixtures it would give the lighting of the scene a more naturalistic feel.
 
Is there a green spike in CFL's like there are in normal flourescents? I haven't checked into that, but I don't see why not.

How high powered are you thinking for these CFL's? You may just want to look into augmenting your existing practicals to take higher wattage globes without burnin' down the house.
 
look for CLF with high CRI( colur render index). I've used nornal CLF i get at the store (daylight balanced) and it works fine...i cant find the CRI of them but i ahvent had a prob with them. (23 W..30W ect )
 
High CRI (93+) 5500K bulbs here. Unfortunately they don't get extremely high for wattage/lumens. Biggest is a 42watt CFL which replaces a 200 watt incandescent and puts out 2,400 lumens. I don't know how big you're looking.

Reasonably high CRI (80-82) at different color temps here. They come in much bigger wattages. Up to 105 watt CFLs which replace 420 watt incandescents and put out 6,900 lumens.

I have used CFLs in the 80-85 CRI range and I've been pretty happy with the results. All CFLs from those sites have been flicker free and noise free for me.
 
How much do you think i'd need in an overhead light fixture with say, 3 sockets lighting people sitting around a dinner table?
 
Are they the only lights you'd be using? It also depends how far you place them from your subjects. The thing to remember with fluoros is they don't have the greatest throw distance. You'd probably want to go with the bigger (85 or 105 watt) bulbs with greater light output.

Another option would be to use more of the smaller (42 watt) bulbs. Check out some of these links for ideas on mounting more smaller bulbs together. A great advantage of using multiple small bulbs is that you can selectively turn off (or unscrew) bulbs to decrease or increase your light output.

Here's the links:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=121563
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=80601
http://www.fotodiox.com/shop/images/cool_tube_&_tungsten/cool_light_1600.jpg
 
We have two 5 socket arrays like those. I don't know how easily we'd be able to mount those on the ceiling (or if we'd want to since we'd be losing them for other uses)
I was just thinking in terms of ease of recreating the lighting setups (we're shooting at the house two different weekends), if we primarily use the existing fixtures it would speed things up.
 
Gotcha. I'm guessing you'd want to go with the big ones from 1000bulbs.com. They throw out quite a bit of soft light and don't really need diffusion. They're a little spendy but have a long life and stay nice and cool. I've been really happy with the Eiko and Sunlite lamps rated at 5000 Kelvin.
 
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