What bulbs are you using in your china balls?

jwing

jwing

Active member
I've done a search in this forum, but I couldn't really find where people mention the types of bulbs they've been having luck with in china balls. I was thinking of picking up some CFLs from home depot, but their rating is 3500k (bright white) and 5000k (daylight).

But I kind of wonder, would mixing a 3500k bulb with standard 3200k tungsten fixtures look funny? Or would the difference be negligible?

The other option is a photoflood that is already 3200k, but I hear these get really hot and die quickly.

What have you been having luck with? (I'm primarily concerned with tungsten balance for now.)
 
I did some looking around and reading up on this about a week ago. From what I found, a very popular option is the N:Vision 6500k daylight CFLs from Home Depot. I actually just picked up 8 last night. They just dropped the price, lucky you! So you can get 2 of them for $5. They are a 23 watt bulb with 100 watt tungsten-light equivalent output.
 
I have used those type of CFL lights (bright white). The color temp did not cause any issues; a few hundred degrees K, is negligible. The issue with those type of bulbs is color rendition, so look for bulbs that have the highest CRI # you can get. With the CRI # 100 equals white. Most of the big box retail store bulbs seem to have CRI #s in the low 90s or high 80s. I would try to stay in the 90s.
I have also used regular household bulbs in them to warm up the light.
I am not a fan of photofloods. They are too expensive, and don't last long.
 
jwing said:
I don't follow. They are 6500K with tungsten-light equivalent (3200K)?
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They are as bright as 100 watt tungstens, but they are CFL, so they use only 27 watts. I think I said 23 before -- sorry, it's 27.

The cord-sets I am using are rated to 100 watt, so I can safely run 4 of those on 1 cord-set. (Ok, technically that puts me 8 watts over...but I'm reasonably sure it's safe).

The CRI thing gets thrown around a lot, but in the end I think it's splitting hairs, and if you're on a budget than the N:Vision bulbs will be fine.

Here's a production from a few years ago that used the Home Depot bulbs in China Balls. After Class.

From that thread:
i found these bulbs that were daylight balanced and had a CRI of 95, which was as high as i could find, that were $20 each. we bought 4, i put them on the splitter setup, we attached it to the cord, hung it, stood back and watched it detach from the cord and plummet to the ground in slow motion, shattering into a million pieces. so if you try this, make sure to tape the 2-prong splitter to your cord with electician's tape. but luckily we found the n:vision bulbs which were a lot cheaper. i couldn't find the CRI for these bulbs but the color seemed good.
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The 500W soft box set-up looked like a night light compared to the
China balls.
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I think that Jwings question is not about the light output equivalence, where you are correct, a CFL rated at 23 or 27 watts will put out the equivalent amount of light as a 100 watt incandescent bulb. The question is about color temperature. A normal tungsten bulb, for filmmaking has a color temp of 3200 degrees Kelvin (K). If the CFL bulbs you talk about above are 6500 degrees K, then their light is going to much bluer than tungsten lights. (Day light is rated at 5500 degrees K) Now if you are only using those CFLs to light with, you can fix that with white balance, but you won't be able to use those CFLs and tungsten together without balancing the color of either the CFLs or the tungsten lights. You would need to add CTB gel to the tungsten or CTO gel to the CFLs to balance them. Now this is assuming that you want them balanced. I have mixed daylight balanced CFLs, with tungsten lights for effect. I put the blue CFLs through a window to simulate movie moonlight and lit the interior with (and white balanced to) tungsten, and lower K CFLS.
 
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saaby said:
They are as bright as 100 watt tungstens, but they are CFL, so they use only 27 watts. I think I said 23 before -- sorry, it's 27.
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I'm not talking about the wattage so much as the color temp. You mentioned bulbs that are 6500K for mixing with tungsten (3200K)? That's the part that confuses me...
 
David G. Smith said:
I think that Jwings question is not about the light output equivalence, where you are correct, a CFL rated at 23 watts will put out the equivalent amount of light as a 100 watt incandescent bulb. The question is about color temperature. A normal tungsten bulb, for filmmaking has a color temp of 3200 degrees Kelvin (K). If the CFL bulbs you talk about above are 6500 degrees K, then their light is going to much bluer than tungsten lights. (Day light is rated at 5500 degrees K) Now if you are only using those CFLs to light with, you can fix that with white balance, but you won't be able to use those CFLs and tungsten together without balancing the color of either the CFLs or the tungsten lights. You would need to add CTB gel to the tungsten or CTO gel to the CFLs to balance them. Now this is assuming that you want them balanced. I have mixed daylight balanced CFLs, with tungsten lights for effect. I put the blue CFLs through a window to simulate movie moonlight and lit the interior with (and white balanced to) tungsten, and lower K CFLS.
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Yeah, I will probably buy different bulbs for the different applications, rather than gelling them too much and losing light and so on. In this case, I will probably get the N:Vision bulbs rated at 3500K to mix with the tungsten lights, if you say that the difference wouldn't really matter. Mostly I just want to experiment with adding soft ambient glows for interior shots.
 
jwing said:
I'm not talking about the wattage so much as the color temp. You mentioned bulbs that are 6500K for mixing with tungsten (3200K)? That's the part that confuses me...
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Sorry Jwing, I jumped on your question (see above). Yeah, I didn't follow that at all either.
 
jwing said:
Yeah, I will probably buy different bulbs for the different applications, rather than gelling them too much and losing light and so on. In this case, I will probably get the N:Vision bulbs rated at 3500K to mix with the tungsten lights, if you say that the difference wouldn't really matter. Mostly I just want to experiment with adding soft ambient glows for interior shots.
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Ok, yeah that is the ticket. The 3500 K vs. 3200 K won't be noticed. Remember with white balance you can warm up these lights, or cool them down, and don't have to worry about light loss to due to the gel filter factor. To warm them up, light balance to a tungsten, or 3500 K CFL with a 1/4 or 1/2 CTB gel on it. To cool them off, do the opposite, by balancing to one of the lights with a 1/4 or a 1/2 CTO on it.
 
How do you gel a china ball? Do you wrap the bulb itself with the gel? Could that cause the gel to melt?
 
jwing said:
How do you gel a china ball? Do you wrap the bulb itself with the gel? Could that cause the gel to melt?
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I haven't gelled a china ball. For the above examples of color control by white balance what I do is just have a tungsten light (most times a 650 open faced quartz light) in which I put the gel(s) on, then use that to set the white balance. I have also just used a house hold bulb, in a Home Depot reflector, with CTO on it, to white balance to. This cools off the tungsten lights even more. I once white balanced to a pocket pen light, with a low battery, which had a very low color temp. This was used while shooting in an abandoned morgue , lit by a few hard ware store, consumer tube fluorescent lights. White balancing to the dim pen light brought out the sickly green color of the consumer Fluos!. It look very cool. When doing this color control, make sure that the only light on your white reference is the light that you are manipulating. For the pen light thing, we went into a windowless bathroom and shot of the ambient lights to set the white balance.

But I don't think that gelling a china ball would be an issue. Most lighting gels are made to be put in front of some pretty hot lights (like the open faced quartz lights) so wrapping them around a bulb in a china ball would not cause any harm. If the bulb in there was hot enough to melt the gel, then the china ball would probably go up in flames first.
 
David G. Smith said:
But I don't think that gelling a china ball would be an issue. Most lighting gels are made to be put in front of some pretty hot lights (like the open faced quartz lights) so wrapping them around a bulb in a china ball would not cause any harm. If the bulb in there was hot enough to melt the gel, then the china ball would probably go up in flames first.
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True. And a low-watt CFL is probably not nearly as hot as any 1K open-face. I just wanted to double check.

Thanks for the input.
 
Oh yeah -- sorry for the confusion. I bought the 6500k ones because I'm generally going to be either only lighting with them, or using them (indoor) to add a little supplement to natural sunlight. Got stuck in my little world and forgot that people, you know, light with Tungsten.

Carry on...
 
Another question: how does one use a dimmer on CFL bulbs? The packages I looked at all say specifically not to use with a dimmer. Huh?!
 
jwing said:
Another question: how does one use a dimmer on CFL bulbs? The packages I looked at all say specifically not to use with a dimmer. Huh?!
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Yes, with flourescent you need a specialized ballast to dim the light. Using a regular dimmer will result in flickering.
 
Huy Vu said:
Yes, with flourescent you need a specialized ballast to dim the light. Using a regular dimmer will result in flickering.
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Absolutely. I saw some consumer CFLs with built in dimmers in a hardware store a while back but remember thinking that they did not look too useful.
To control intensity (quantity of light on the subject) you would need to use a lower wattage bulb, ND gels and/or scrims or the good ole' Inverse Square Law (for uniform light sources, light intensity will fall off as the inverse square of the distance, I think the math is 1/D squared times the intensity). In other words, move the light back until it is at the intensity you want and flag off any spill, if needed.
 
When using the CFL's you really don't need a china ball. They are so soft and even (because there isn't any focal point or filament) that just hanging them over your scene is quite effective.
As far as dimming yes they do make a dimmable version but they are about 3 times the cost of the non-dimmable versions. To control the intensity just move the bulb further away from your subject, the light falloff is quite dramatic. I actually use the daylight versions almost exclusively. They're perfect when you have mixed daylight or need it outside.
Gary
 
I've put gel inside a china ball on one side only, creating a bit of a reflector surface. Just roll up a square piece of gel to get it inside, then unroll it and use the square corners to anchor it against the sides of the china ball. Takes just a second to get it in there.

Using 1/8 CTO as the reflector will knock down a typical home improvement 6500K CFL to about 5600K.
 
I second what someone else said, that you don't need a china lantern if you use CFLs. Especially like this big one:

CLSFT1%203-4%20View%20White%20Compressed%20Small.jpg


You can hang that upside down from a ceiling, put it in a softbox, side mount it as shown with nothing on it at all and it is one big bright but soft source. Its a 200w 8U bulb and you can get them in 3200K or 5600K.
 
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