What experiences have you had with lighting for digital photography? The natural instinct is to light just as you would for film, but we all know digital cameras don't work like film does. Have you tried strobes v. floodlights, incandescent v. fluorescent, "daylight" balanced vs. not?

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-- Neil Okamoto (nokamoto@anim.dreamworks.com), October 30, 1998

Answers

Yes..by all means..lighting will help ur finished pitures so much..you'll ask yourself why have i lasted so long without xtra lighting. Regular household lighting is not too good..I have 4 digi cams..trust me. Get a slave flash..a flash that will go off when the one on ur camera goes off. I use 2..sometimes one for a hair or backlight..experiment is fun. The best(and cheapest) I have seen are at ritz camera. I got 2 of their wireless flash boosters..so cool at only 19.95 each! No need to pay more elsewhere for similar...(Gee.I sound like a commercial!)Check them out here..although u have to call them with any order..good luck! http://www.ritzcamera.com/

-- Mike Valley (cpanthers@email.com), November 04, 1998.

The Morris Co. makes a wide range of slave flash units. My favorite is the Morris-Mini bare bulb. They can be placed behind your subject to illuminate the background or used to augment the built in flash.

-- David Kerr (daveylad@AOL.com), November 23, 1998.

One definite difference is that digicams don't do well with lots of infrared floating around. (The IR goes straight through the filters, and can swamp the color signal on the CCD.) Many incorporate IR filters in them, but other do not. Thus, "hot" lights are problematic. Film has no similar problem. Tiffen makes "hot mirror" filters that block most of the IR, but my results with them have been variable. FOr our studio shots, we use some very specialized incandescents (made by Tailored Lighting, at www.soluxtli.com), that exactly reproduce "standard" daylight. Probably not a practical solution for most folks though. My recommendation would be to use flash, unless you've tried tungsten and had good results.

-- Dave Etchells (detchells@imaging-resource.com), November 30, 1998.

Sorry, another thought - You mentioned fluorescents: We've found that most digicams do a poor job of color-compensating for fluorescent lighting. What's more, fluorescent is strange to work with for some color-critical subjects, particularly dyes used to color polyester fabrics: The spikey color spectrum of the fluorescent can give rise to all manner of strange metameric color-rendering problems. (Likewise the HMI lights so loved by the movie industry, only more so.)

-- Dave Etchells (detchells@imaging-resource.com), November 30, 1998.

Long wavelengths focus at a different distance than visible light, so not only would you get polluted color but you lose sharpness as well.

For "hot" tungsten lamps I've seen it done with hot mirrors on the lamps as well as IR filters at the lens. The hot mirrors *are* variable, especially in large sheets, but combined with IR trimmer filters with fairly sharp cutoff one can get good results.

I suspect metamerism would be an issue with fluorescent lamps, but then again what do flatbed scanners use?

I'm extremely curious about the SoLux lamps, but haven't had a chance to try them myself. I unerstand they're doing a test with a studio photographer who reproduces fine-arts paintings. Those results are going to be very interesting...

-- Neil Okamoto (nokamoto@anim.dreamworks.com), December 02, 1998.