Forget the viewfinder debates, we've got new HMI lights in the studio.

K5600 Lighting. Alpha 200.

This is a beautiful and compact HMI light 

that is also a focusable spot. It's a wonderful 

tool for finely crafted lighting. 

If you read the blog on a regular basis you've got to know that I have a soft spot for continuous lighting. I like using tungsten lights, LEDs, fluorescent fixtures and now, HMIs. But that doesn't mean for a second that I think you should abandon the ubiquitous photographer love affair with flash of all varieties. It's just that continuous lights provide such immediate results. It's so much easier to see the effect your lighting is having on a subject if the light hangs around long enough for your eyes to register what you are actually seeing. I'll go out on a sturdy limb here and say that continuous lights are the best learning tools for people who want to really, really learn how to light. Not just how to bounce some photons off a white ceiling but to be able to see definitive changes in outcome from seemingly small adjustments. Feathering an parabolic reflector is a good example. Finding the penumbra of light is harder when you use a modeling light or depend on trial and error...

If you are an event photographer then by all means, grab that SB-900 or that Canon Speedlight and go to town. You need to be untethered and mobile. And you probably want to freeze the action as your subjects freeze their smiles onto their faces. But, if you want to try your hand at still life or even portrait photography you might be pleasantly surprised at how flexible and satisfying it can be to work with light that sticks around. 

I love tungsten lighting because it comes in all shapes and sizes and some fixtures can project razor sharp beams of light while others, when used through big diffusion, can give the soft effect of northern light coming through high, thin clouds. The downsides of tungsten are that it consumes a lot of electrical energy which it converts mainly into heat and infra-red radiation. Tungsten also has a color temperature that is very different from daylight which makes balancing this light source with ambient daylight a bit more difficult than with most other light sources. You can easily filter it accurately but you'll need to worry about heat. A powerful tungsten fixture can melt a filter used too closely in minutes....

That's why a lot of people who work with continuous lighting have embraced LEDs and fluorescents. They are much more efficient with electrical energy and can be filtered or engineered to work in tandem with daylight. The weak spot for both of theses sources is both the lower light output you get with them and the discontinuous spectrum you'll get with all but the most expensive fixtures. (If you are using either source as your dominate light in a space with no daylight infiltration the color balance is not important as custom white balancing takes care of most spectral mismatches...).

The optimum continuous light would be nicely and accurately daylight balanced, strong enough to use in any ambient lighting situation and agile enough to provide many looks. While LEDs are encroaching into the film making space at a rapid clip the long time gold standard for most cinematographers has been the HMI light. 

So, what are they, really?  Here's what the Wikipedia says:

Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide, or HMI, is the brand name of Osram brand for a metal-halide gas discharge medium arc-length lamp manufactured for film and entertainment applications. Hydrargyrum is Latin for mercury (Hg).

An HMI lamp uses mercury vapour mixed with metal halides in a quartz-glass envelope, with two tungsten electrodes of medium arc separation. Unlike traditional lighting units using incandescent light bulbs, HMIs need electrical ballasts, which are separated from the head via a header cable, to limit current and supply the proper voltage. The lamp operates by creating an electrical arc between two electrodes within the bulb that excites the pressurized mercury vapour and metal halides, and provides very high light output with greater efficacy than incandescent lighting units. The efficiency advantage is near fourfold, with approximately 85–108 lumens per watt of electricity. Unlike tungsten-halogen lamps where the halide gas is used to regenerate the filament and keep the evaporated tungsten from darkening the glass, the mercury vapour and the metal halides in HMI lamps are what emit the light. The high CRI and color temperature are due to the specific lamp chemistries.

The HMI light depends on an electronic ballast to feed the right voltage to the bulb which works as by creating an arc between encased tungsten electrodes. As stated above the typical HMI is about four times as efficient in electrical energy conversion than a tungsten light and by extension creates much less heat. One thing a bare HMI bulb does generate in ample amounts is UV energy which is why you must never use a bulb directly, you always need a glass lens (UV treated) between the bulb and human or animal subject.

The folks at K5600 Lighting sent me their latest small kit. It contains two different light heads and a ballast for each head. The heads take 200 watt bulbs which, theoretically, should equal the actual lighting output of an 800 watt tungsten light. It's hard to compare lights directly since the reflectors or fresnel lenses in front of them create different spreads and different intensities. But the overall advantage is a small light source with much more power and kick than an LED or a Flo and with a much tighter color spectrum match to daylight.

Along with the basic kit the folks at K5600 Lighting also sent along two extra bulbs. These are tungsten balanced and it's the first time I've ever seen tungsten balanced HMIs. I can only imagine this flexibility comes in very hand when mixes these lights on sets that are predominantly lit by conventional tungsten fixtures. They also sent along a collection of different lenses for their Alpha light which can be used on both fixtures.

HMIs are expensive. A single 18,000 watt K5600 fixture with ballast and accessories is around $18,000. (No, I did not add too many zeros) This little kit, with two 200 watters, retails at B&H for something a bit over $4,000. (edit 10/9, I originally wrote $6,000+ but I was wrong and have corrected this. Now that the kit is one third less (in my mind) it seems much more accessible to me. Sorry for the error!)  So who is the target market for this package? To be honest I'd love to have these two lights around the studio so I could use them interchangeably for both studio portraits and also video interviews in the studio and on locations. I'd actually want a third fixture so I could use one with a fresnel lens to "spot" a background while using one for a main light through big diffusion and keeping one in reserve for backlighting or fill. But they are out of my current budget. The folks who buy these are the movie rental houses. Places like GEAR in Austin.

These lights would rent out as part of a lighting package that a video crew would rent for a few days at a time to do specific projects that call for lots of mixed lighting scenarios.

The reason I like them is that the light spectrum is famous for making skin tones look incredibly good and for a good, long while HMI lights like these were the secret weapon for fashion photographers and very high end, editorial portrait photographers. I remember reading a "behind the scenes" article about the making of a Victoria's Secret catalog in which HMI's played a major part...

The back end of the Alpha 200. That's the fresnel spot.

See the knob on the lower right of the housing?

That's to control the angle of the beam.

I'm using the lights this month to do several portraits I've wanted to try. I love the look of continuous light portraits for the way the slower shutter speeds and the micro-movement of human beings fuses a sharp and less sharp image together into something that's hard to reproduce with flash. I'm also doing another restaurant video this month and hope to use the open faced fixture, the Joker But 200, in a Chimera Lantern modifier as my consistent main light to use in an kitchen that needs some lighting boost. With a solid light source in a 360 degree modifier my partner and I will be able to work through whole areas with enough extra illumination to make the difference between ISO 800 and ISO 1600. One stop may not sound like much but makes a big difference in noise profiles and color consistency. I've been testing the lights all day and I'm already sad at the though that they are "loaners" and will have to be shipped back......at some point. 

(Above) This is a light weight ballast. There's a ballast for 

each light fixture. The ballast supplies an even, accurate and 

clean voltage to the bulbs. These have massive heat 

sinks that keep the electronics cool. Important on 

projects that last for hours (or days). 

I have no idea why they are named, "Joker Bug 200." but the 

light fixtures are incredibly well made and use lots of

interchangeable metal parts. You can change the look 

of the light in many way and you can use speed rings to 

adapt Profoto modifiers to the lights as well.

I have the two light kit. My favorite set up is to use the fresnel (Alpha) fixture as a soft edged spotlight aimed into a dark canvas or gray paper background. I use the open faced Joker Bug with 

a lens that creates an even, centrally focused beam of light which I direct through soft diffusion materials. This lighting set up, combined with a fast, short telephoto lens, like an 85mm make beautiful portraits. Especially with the lens aperture used nearly wide open. My three test cameras are the Olympus EM-5 with an older Olympus 60mm f1.5, a Nikon D7100 with an 85mm 1.8 and the Samsung NX 30 with the 85mm 1.4. I'll try to get some good work done and posted so you can see the effects. 

In closing I must say that I find it strange that people have such strongly held opinions (myself included) about optical versus electronic viewfinders when so little attention is paid on the web to finer points of lighting and lighting tools. The lights make so much more of a difference that the different ways of lining up images in cameras with such similar sensors. In a finished image no one will be able to tell if you used an optical viewfinder or an electronic one (or an LCD screen for that matter) but the choice of lights and modifiers can make huge and very obvious difference. The various properties of lights and lighting can also have more nuanced differences as well. Funny that we don't discuss that in depth....