I've been trying to figure out how to store my newest gimbal. I wanted a solid case that would protect it while traveling to weird locations. I looked around the studio and spied an old, black Pelican case wedged under some Metro shelving. I hadn't opened that particular case in years but I pretty much knew it had some old light fixtures from a different age. I opened it up and found one Lowell Tota-Light (pictured above) and two Lowell VIP lights. All three are tungsten light fixtures that take 500 watt bulbs and have barn doors that fold up to protect the lamp.
My instantly retrieved memory of these lights was about how often I burned my hands trying to handle them before they cooled off and how hot the rooms got when we had three or four of theses fired up to shoot ancient Sony Beta SP video. Since it was pretty cold outside yesterday and I wanted to set up a quick light for my on camera chat I decided to just put the Tota-Light on a C-Stand, put us a big diffuser and then see if the lamp still worked. It did. Well. And it kept me warm for a while.
Funny, we've more or less (collectively) relegated inexpensive "hot" lights to the trash heap of video production but yesterday's session reminded me about a few features that I'd more or less forgotten in the heedless pursuit of LED lighting at all costs.
First of all, you can buy a used Tota-Light fixture for around $75 and a lamp for about $15. Aim it at a diffuser and turn it on and you've got an amazing amount of light in one small, inexpensive package. Bounce a 500 watt off the ceiling and you can evenly light up a small space. But there's more to it than quantity. Hot lights/tungsten halogens are very, very color accurate. There are no big spikes in their spectrum like there are in most inexpensive LEDs and nothing to correct. If you are matching lights from set to set you'll have no problem with hue or color temperature with your lights. They sit there at 3200° until the tubes burn out or you assistant bangs them around before they've cooled and kills the filament.
They can also be (see the Total-Light) small and light and easy to use.
When I shot some video yesterday I set up the light and set the camera at the tungsten bulb setting for WB. When I looked at the virgin footage with a vector scope enabled in Final Cut Pro X the light fell exactly on the flesh tone index line with no weird spikes or splintered. The white dot was centered and compact. Nearly a perfect white balance. No muss, no fuss.
They do suck up electrical power. They do run quite hot. But damn they are color accurate and easy to use.
No, not giving up on the LEDs now. The tungsten lamps are pricy and prone to having short and sad lives. But I'm not ready to jettison these three little lights. They've got some practical use left in them.
Nice to rediscover stuff.
6 comments:
Sold my Tota-Lites and also a pair of Lowell D lites a few years ago. I had five of the Tota-Lites plus cords, stands, gel filter holders, etc., even attachments to mount the lights on walls or ceilings or hang them over a door. They served me well.
Maybe I will hold onto my Tota-Lite kit after all. Thanks for the blast from the past.
there is also the excitement of having modifiers melt or catch fire, that keeps things interesting
I still have the two Totas and two Omnis that I shot my first portfolio on, to look for assisting jobs. And there was at least one studio in Minneapolis using hot lights exclusively after everyone else had long been shooting Normans and Speedotrons. I used them for copy work on an artist's paintings, and the artist loved the accurate results, but continued to use a hobbyist friend who had been out of town when I shot that one show. I also loaned them long term to my mother, who used them to photograph her own paintings.
I didn't shoot portraits with them, but I always thought (with good reason, there were warnings published) that they could potentially give portrait subjects a sunburn if not used carefully. I bought mine before they considered the protective screens (for shattering bulbs) de rigueur. In an un-airconditioned studio in Texas in the summer for portraiture they are probably now a violation of the Geneva convention.
Lee
Those were the days of, regardless of whether you carried strobes or hot lights, you had to be great at calculating how much juice you were going to draw and could the circuit handle it (mind if I run this cord across your house and into your kitchen?). Or worst case scenario for a big production, could the panel handle it. But yes, we had extraordinarily clean light every time (from the Speedotron black's too but not the early Norman's). With the heat, weight in the case of strobes, power requirements, and need for extension cords all over the place, it's no wonder so many compositions and final images were as stiff as an ironing board.
Old news photographer used to carry a 200 watt incandescent bulb for any feature stuff he did in people's homes. Would just replace the dingy bulb in the existing lamp near his subject and shoot away. None of us ever knew how he got such great available light stuff until years later. Marveled at how he never set anything on fire. Of course the intrepid Tota and even Omni's on one of their lightweight stands whacked into a ceiling produced the same effect. Though, if not careful with proximity, they would remove paint faster than a heat gun.
I just shot some artwork with 40 year old Omni Lites through polarizing gel and shoot through umbrellas. I fine tuned the color (very minimal shift) and exposure with a Colorchecker Passport and was good to go.
Jim
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