Afradet. Early LED experiment. It seemed to have worked.

 

I'm having a renewed love affair with LED lights since I recently purchased two of the Nanlite FS-300-C RGB LED lighting units. I feel like we've finally hit parity (or close enough) with electronic flash units when it comes to color accuracy and overall usability. 300 Watts of LED output is more than enough to work with most studio portrait needs and having that much power also allows for bouncing clean light off high ceilings when working in remote locations. 

(Added just for fun...)

Many of the previous LED lighting units I've owned were designed with power supply and control apparatus contained in a separate enclosure and the light head separated from that box by a cable. There were nearly proprietary connectors on the cables and forgetting any one cable on a location shoot would have spelled disaster.  The current lights I'm using were designed almost light flash monolights in that the power supply, control interface and the light are all contained in one body. It's conveniently mounted to standard light stands and this makes daily use quick and easy. Fast set up and fast tear down.

I'm currently playing around with two of these lights to make portraits. I'm setting the main light up behind 4x4 foot panel with two layers of one stop silk on the panel frame for a nice, soft and controllable light source. The second one is being used with a grid spot on the reflector for illuminating backgrounds. It's nice. It's also the way I always liked to work with flash ---- so it's familiar. 

Big, soft LED sources are great for still like work because they fall so perfectly into the "What you see is what you get!" category. And that makes composing and lighting so much easier. 

It's Saturday now and our club pool is still closed for maintenance and upgrades. I've been swimming this week at the Deep Eddy Pool; an Austin City public pool which is open year round, uses no chlorine and is filled and drained nearly every other day with water from deep wells. The water temperature stays within a narrow range. Right around 70°. That's about ten or eleven degrees colder than our usual workout pool and you can really tell the difference when you get in. It's shocking!!!

The cold always pushes me to go faster to stay warm but it can be a negative as the cold temperature means tighter muscles and more effort. It's also harder to get warmed up and swim as relaxed as I usually try to do. I often come home with sore muscles; especially triceps. I have to do more stretching after each swim to try to maintain flexibility. I can't wait until my main pool is back up and running. 

Rumor has it that the sacred container of perfect water will be up and running on Tuesday. I hope it pans out this way because the weather report predicts that winter is finally arriving here. Swimming outside  when the temps drop into the thirties and forties is just fine if the water is warm enough but a cold pool, cold temperatures and a cold wind are much less comfortable... I guess it's all part of the discipline. 

Hope you are happy and well. Comments always (mostly...) welcome. 

Coming up shortly: A preview essay about Will van Overbeek's "Wet Dog Show." The opening is coming up on the 24th. 30 wonderful and funny, big photos. And wet dogs!!! What's not to like?