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Hello all. This is my first post to this forum, and I am a newbie, so please be gentle. :-)
My question is this. If I buy a set of worklights from Home Depot, and replace the halogen lights with quartz lights, could I attach a softbox to this without burning down anything?
Also, would an 80a filter be the correct filter to use to compensate for the quartz lights?
I am on a mico-shoe string budget, but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
It would be VERY difficult to get a softbox to work with a set of halogen lights. Even if you replaced the bulbs. The heat build-up would still be intense (the quartz bulbs on a flash unit produce intense heat, but only very briefly, you areproducing this heat constantly), the softbox would have to be made for or adapted for just those lights, etc.
As for a filter, why not just try B&W?
I don't think the usual soft box could even begin to take the heat. The modeling lamps in my DynaLites are 200W halogens and I'm pretty sure that without the cooling fans in operation I'd just about destroy the soft boxes. I haven't tried it, though ... hmm ...
Nah! I'm not curious enough to try.
If memory serves, an 80A is the prescribed filter to balance the light from a clear fash bulb (anyone remember those?) for use with daylight color film (3800K > 5500K); an 80B would be for R2 Floodlamps to daylight (3200K > 5500K) -Note 1.
Does anyone here know what the color temperatures of either quartz or halogen lamps are?
Note 1: I'm sure that if I'm wrong about the numbers here, there will be someone to correct me - faster than the speed of light.
Most soft box companies, Photoflex, Chimera etc all make products for the movie and TV industry. Their softboxes are designed to take the heat. Where you will run into to trouble is adapting the light to the softbox.
These companies make "speedrings" which fit on most lightheads that are designed for photgraphers, still and video etc. These speedrings attach easily to the the light head and then to the softbox.
In your application you would have to adapt some sort of universal "speedring" to those lights and it may or may not be easy.
If you shoot black and white it shouldn't matter too much about the color temp. In color you would have to, as others have mentioned, filter either the lights or the lens.
For more info on softboxes just do a google search or Photoflex or Chimera.
Michael MCBlane
you might consider instead of home depot lights looking for olde lowel lights ( now they are called "L" lights) you can usually find them on feebay for way under 100$ for a 6-light kit. they take floods instead and places like topbulb.com or bulbman.com have daylight floods ... i have a bunch of them bought cheep ... i don't use them with soft boxes - i think lowel light also makes soft boxes - for their hotlights ..
you might consider doing "bounce" with foam core - it would be cheeper than a softbox THAT is for sure :)
good luck!
- john
As jnanian says there is a lot of different options. It would help if we knew what you liked to shoot and what your plans were as well as what kind of budget you have for this.
But there are many different ways to light things and more of a description would help.
Michael McBlane
Also, think outside the softbox for diffusion options.
Stretch some translucent fabric on a frame and use it as a diffuser. I've seen really big ones made out of military surplus parachutes. In the movie business this is called a "silk."
Bounce the light off a sheet of white foamcore or foamcore covered with aluminum foil (or make it one side white, one side silver).
Bounce a light off a sheet of foamcore, and then put your fabric diffuser between the light and the subject, so the bounced light is coming back through the fabric for lots of diffusion--softer than a softbox and heat isn't as much of an issue, since it's an open structure.
A cute trick I read recently (somewhere) indicated the use of one of those $2.00 styrofoam "coolers" as a cheap soft light apparatus. I haven't tried it but maybe soon.
I think the guy cut a hole in the bottom and inserted a strobe or something... boy old age sucks.... My birthday today too. Truly, dr bob.
happy birthday Dr Bob
lee\c
Happy birthday Dr Bob.
You can aviod filtering the lights all together if you use tungston film. They have it for both color neg and Transparency. As for lighting you can get away with almost every type of light out there. And it does not have to cost much of anything. The key is to once you have some light, experiment. It's really a lot of fun. make lots of mistakes to learn form. You can take old house lights out of the trash or spend lots of money for ones designed for this business, but they produce the same thing, light.