Good practical bulbs

thefilmaddict

thefilmaddict

Veteran
I mainly have all daylight balanced lights now. When mixing them with practical lights in a shot (like a lamp), are you guys changing out the bulbs in the practicals? Are there decent practical bulbs that affordable that have a high cri without flicker?
 
Lots of people rather like the amberish glow that low wattage 3/3.2K tungsten lamps have - you see these nice cosy table lamps all over the place, and are now largely one of those mistakes that is becoming normal. If you want them white, it's easier to have some tubes of blue cc gel handy to slip over them and get white, but I don't bother anymore, unless they are for proper illumination. Kind of the modern version of the candlelight popular in movies from the 70s/80s, where the orange glow was mainly artificial.
 
Run&Gun said:
How deep down the rabbit hole do you wanna go? And are your pockets just as deep?

https://astera-led.com/nyx/

About $100 a pop.
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Reminds me of the time a rabbit swallowed the engagement ring I had for the woman of my dreams. I always wore pants with deep pockets and regularly made references to having deep pockets, but one of my deep pockets had a hole in them so the ring fell out onto my lawn. Rabbit swallows it and goes deep down the rabbit hole. I grab a shovel and start digging, and digging...and digging, this rabbit hole is going straight to hell or China (if there is a difference) and after eight hours and just 15 feet of progress, I know it's time to take it up a notch. I go out and rent heavy duty machinery, spend all of next day working on that, get another 10 feet of depth but I end up crashing the digger into the hole and then have to hire a bunch of other people and machines to get that out. At this point I know this job is beyond my capabilities so I hire a team of professional contractors with several machines and they spend the next week drilling and digging, getting down to a 65 foot hole. And $36,000 later, we strike pay dirt and find the end of the rabbit hole, where the rabbit is going at it like a rabbit with its wife, and the seven kids are in a separate bedroom chilling out. I'm starting to get really jealous that this rabbit has interfered with my relationship and is off enjoying it's entire family at my expense. I pay the contractors and machinery thus depleting my formerly deep pockets and sending me to the poor house, and have them leave as I don't want any witnesses to what I'm about to do, as I'm very hungry from the past week of working on this, and I'm realizing also vindictively that this rabbit family of nine is enough to feed me for a few weeks since I can no longer afford to buy food. So, I naturally turn the rabbit and its entire family into rabbit stew.

The next day I'm having a romantic candlelit dinner with my girlfriend and I start telling her the story of how I had an item that I lost, and the great lengths I went to recover it, for her, because I love her, and want to spend the rest of my life with her, despite no longer having deep pockets. And then I get down on my knee, pull out the item I had been describing, the ring, tell her that is the item, and ask her to marry me. And she starts feeling sick, and asks, "Is this dinner the rabbits?" I say, "Yes." She says, "And the rabbit kids?" I say, "Of course." She asks how I murdered them. I say, "I wasn't entirely sure which one had the ring, so I just started stabbing each one of them several times, gutted them while alive, thoroughly enjoying it, the parents first in front of their kids, then the kids one a time, until eventually I found the ring, and in that moment knew that my relationship with her was saved, and we'd spend the rest of our lives together. And I was hungry. So it was rabbit stew to make out of what was left of the butchered rabbit family."

At this moment she then vomited in my face. She said she loved rabbits and used to have a pet one as a kid, and some stuff about me being a psychopath, but she was totally off base with that. She then ran out of the house crying and I have never seen or heard from her since.

I froze the leftover rabbit family meat and still have a lot of it left in my freezer. Whenever I'm nostalgically feeling the tragic loss of my ex girlfriend, I make a tearful meal out of it to stroll down memory lane.



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On the subject of practicals, I bought some Hue bulbs recently and they flicker and such and look bad on camera. I've been considering some of those Astera bulbs as they are probably the best now available, not exactly cheap, but if you only need a couple not all that expensive.
 
I'm sure the OP is shaking his head and wondering WTF he started... Lol

Back to the Astera's. I love their stuff and even thought the 'bulbs' are pricey, I've thought about grabbing maybe two or so myself, just in-case. For interviews, the chances of having more than one or two lamps in the shot are pretty slim. And it's pretty rare anyway when we have one in the shot period. I can only recall one interview from last year, right now, where we had practical lamps in the shot. But of course, we actually had to hide a small LED in the lampshade so we could control it, because If I recall, it was a God-awful compact flo in it.

In the pre-LED days, one of my friends used to carry very low wattage rough service bulbs that were silicon/rubber coated(or something like that) so that they wouldn't shatter everywhere, if broken.
 
on the simple/reasonably-priced side, CREE from North Carolina makes about the best A19-style bulbs you can easily find at your local Home Depot, available in either 3000ish or 5000ish flavors and dimmable. Feit are also ok but don't always dim reliably. GE tends to run way too magenta. The various Chinese "photo cob-style LED" bulbs on Amazon are a firkin' nightmare.
 
mcbob said:
on the simple/reasonably-priced side, CREE from North Carolina makes about the best A19-style bulbs you can easily find at your local Home Depot, available in either 3000ish or 5000ish flavors and dimmable. Feit are also ok but don't always dim reliably. GE tends to run way too magenta. The various Chinese "photo cob-style LED" bulbs on Amazon are a firkin' nightmare.
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Cree emitters are awesome. The flood lights outside my house are made with Cree LED’s. I think the lamps(bulbs) are Intellytech (not THAT Intellytech) from Lowe’s. If you didn’t know, you’d swear they were real tungsten or halogen. I’ve tried the GE Reveal LED bulbs and they are magenta. I have either a Philips or Sylvania(maybe?) in the lamp on my night stand in the bedroom and it’s very yellow/green. Even makes some of my dogs fur look weird. The equivalent of bad skin tones on people.
 
QuickHitRecord said:
Bought one of these for the house and I am intrigued by its potential for production. Been thinking about picking up a few more for my kit. It has a CRI of 80, but it looks better than expected to my eye. At 300 watts, it puts out a lot of light: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XF26GXK
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Well that says 33w draw, 300w tungsten equivalent, right? I'd be amazed if they were selling a bulb like that with 300w power draw and then it had better be damn bright!
 
Yes, 33w draw. Should be about as bright as a 300w tungsten. I think it is, roughly. Been a while since I've fired up a 300w tungsten though.

I think it was Alzo that used to make bulbs for practical lamps. Can't remember what the technology was but I think they even came with a ballast and were supposedly super bright. They were discontinued but I never knew why. They seemed super versatile.
 
Great answers guys. Especially that insane rabbit hole story! $100 is a bit pricey. I’ve done shoots where I leave the warm bulbs in and people don’t mind it. For those that do mind it or when I turn on a lamp with a bulb in it that looks like crap, I’ll try a couple of the cheaper options.
 
thefilmaddict said:
Great answers guys. Especially that insane rabbit hole story! $100 is a bit pricey. I’ve done shoots where I leave the warm bulbs in and people don’t mind it. For those that do mind it or when I turn on a lamp with a bulb in it that looks like crap, I’ll try a couple of the cheaper options.
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Most of the time there’s nothing wrong with having an actual tungsten lamp, you can dim that to taste, and within reason, the warmth looks natural. The problem you run into more often than not, is the stupid, horrible looking CFL bulbs and crappy consumer LED bulbs that look almost as bad and you can’t dim.

My Grandmother passed away a few years ago and my Mom is in the process of moving into that house now, after some light renovations. I went through and removed every damn CFL that was in there and replaced them with true tungsten. It feels so mouth more warm and inviting, like an actual home again.
 
Eric Coughlin said:
Reminds me of the time a rabbit swallowed the engagement ring I had for the woman of my dreams. I always wore pants with deep pockets and regularly made references to having deep pockets, but one of my deep pockets had a hole in them so the ring fell out onto my lawn. Rabbit swallows it and goes deep down the rabbit hole. I grab a shovel and start digging, and digging...and digging, this rabbit hole is going straight to hell or China (if there is a difference) and after eight hours and just 15 feet of progress, I know it's time to take it up a notch. I go out and rent heavy duty machinery, spend all of next day working on that, get another 10 feet of depth but I end up crashing the digger into the hole and then have to hire a bunch of other people and machines to get that out. At this point I know this job is beyond my capabilities so I hire a team of professional contractors with several machines and they spend the next week drilling and digging, getting down to a 65 foot hole. And $36,000 later, we strike pay dirt and find the end of the rabbit hole, where the rabbit is going at it like a rabbit with its wife, and the seven kids are in a separate bedroom chilling out. I'm starting to get really jealous that this rabbit has interfered with my relationship and is off enjoying it's entire family at my expense. I pay the contractors and machinery thus depleting my formerly deep pockets and sending me to the poor house, and have them leave as I don't want any witnesses to what I'm about to do, as I'm very hungry from the past week of working on this, and I'm realizing also vindictively that this rabbit family of nine is enough to feed me for a few weeks since I can no longer afford to buy food. So, I naturally turn the rabbit and its entire family into rabbit stew.

The next day I'm having a romantic candlelit dinner with my girlfriend and I start telling her the story of how I had an item that I lost, and the great lengths I went to recover it, for her, because I love her, and want to spend the rest of my life with her, despite no longer having deep pockets. And then I get down on my knee, pull out the item I had been describing, the ring, tell her that is the item, and ask her to marry me. And she starts feeling sick, and asks, "Is this dinner the rabbits?" I say, "Yes." She says, "And the rabbit kids?" I say, "Of course." She asks how I murdered them. I say, "I wasn't entirely sure which one had the ring, so I just started stabbing each one of them several times, gutted them while alive, thoroughly enjoying it, the parents first in front of their kids, then the kids one a time, until eventually I found the ring, and in that moment knew that my relationship with her was saved, and we'd spend the rest of our lives together. And I was hungry. So it was rabbit stew to make out of what was left of the butchered rabbit family."

At this moment she then vomited in my face. She said she loved rabbits and used to have a pet one as a kid, and some stuff about me being a psychopath, but she was totally off base with that. She then ran out of the house crying and I have never seen or heard from her since.

I froze the leftover rabbit family meat and still have a lot of it left in my freezer. Whenever I'm nostalgically feeling the tragic loss of my ex girlfriend, I make a tearful meal out of it to stroll down memory lane.



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Great story. When's the movie coming out? :beer:
 
Remarkably the same exact thing happened to me in Eric’s story only it was a family from Scotland.
 
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