I Shot a Lot

Professionally, I’ve shot one wedding before and it was a complete nightmare.  I was somewhat roped into it by a coworker at the last minute and I ended up shooting the whole thing with a Nikon D200, a Nikon SB600 flash, a Nikon SB800 flash and the wretched Nikkor 18-200 VR zoom lens.  I had very little experience on the equipment, zero experience shooting a wedding and zero room for failure.  Although the pictures were mostly acceptable from an artistic perspective, I would never put myself in that sort of situation again.

The flowergirl was a ham.

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I stumbled across this post on fotohacker.com: “White Balance Reloaded”.

I don’t mean to be critical of the site for propagating slightly inaccurate information because the post is very good information for the amateur photographer, however I believe that they oversimplify and repeat some misconceptions about light color that serve only to obfuscate one of the most fundamental aspects of image capture.  Camera manufacturers are somewhat complicit in this simplification of lighting color by using Kelvin numbers as white balance settings, but it’s important to remember that “Color Temperature”, “Color Balance” and “White Balance” are all different things.

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Everybody loves cheap, but cheap comes with some specific costs.  

Want a low-priced CFL bulb?  No problem, but don’t expect color rendering to be very reliable.  Want a cheap bulb housing?  No problem, but be prepared to work with some crappy mounting options, limited flexibility and a 6′ cord.  

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Now that we’ve established the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, it was now my ambition to see if I could build an off-the-shelf lighting system using parts from Home Depot.  In some ways I was successful, and in others I faced some intersting limitations.

Knowing that the end goal is shooting some of the food we cook for my wife’s site The Fashionable Foodie, I decided that I would set a few parameters before shopping.  Since we’re both new at this, I wanted to minimize as many variables as possible.  We have very little experience plating, styling, photographing, lighting and setting scenery, so I thought it would be best to cut out table settings entirely.  I decided to begin by building a table-top cyclorama to shoot all the subjects on a plain white background for simplicity’s sake. 

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In my last post, I stumbled through an explanation of what Color Temperature is and why it doesn’t apply to fluorescent lighting.  But, if Color Temperature doesn’t apply to fluorescents, why do they put a color temperature measurement on most florescent light packaging?

Well, they’re not deliberately trying to be deceitful, what they’re using is a Correlated Color Temperature or CCT.

Effectively, the rating listed on the packaging of a given bulb indicates the incandescent color temperature that the light will most closely mimic.  Because our eyes are incredibly good at adapting to different qualities of illumination, this correlated color temperature measurement is essentially “close enough” for every day life.  For example, “Warm White” bulbs are listed with a CCT between 2800 K to 3500 K, and for most purposes are similar in color tone to common tungsten-based interior lighting.

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Fluorescent lighting has become ubiquitous in our daily lives as an energy-efficient and cost-effective lighting solution, but that familiarity can lead one to believe incorrectly that fluorescent light is interchangeable with other common sources.  The truth that both pure sunlight and electric incandescent lighting are fundimentally different from fluorescents, and to completely understand the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, one must come to understand the basis of these differences.

Since I’ve challenged myself to try and create a lighting solution similar to the Lowel Ego light, understanding some basic fundimentals of fluorescent light will greatly help in choosing an “off the shelf” system that will produce optimal results.

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