Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On 2/27/02 at 12:31 PM, henryting10@yahoo.com (Henry Ting) thoughtfully wrote: > Question on artificial lighting. > Take for example a night game of basketball, baseball, > or horse-racing, is there a definitive way to tell > whether its tungsten lighting, mercury lighting or > otherwise without having a color-temperature meter ? > Can I assume that these lightings are close to 3200K ? Good question - I'll be interested in the answers but I'll also inquire at the darkroom because lately a lot of sports photogs have been processing prints from Kings and Sharks games. I'd have to think that an venue designed for professional sports will be different from a venue designed for, say, high school sports. They will have thought about television coverage and lighted to the standards the networks need. A few years ago I was at the USA Swimming Olympic Team Trials and was amazed by the lighting that NBC added. I had thought the Indianapolis natatorium was quite bright - but the lights from NBC were both substantially brighter and, to my eye, substantially bluer than the normal facility lights. As the new sulfer technology lights find more uses - they are very energy efficient and have a spectrum relatively close to daylight (according to the literature) - this may begin to change. I'd love to light my family room with one of those but the smallest fixture I can find is 1KW and it provides about 50 times the amount of light I need even when the light is directed at ceiling 12-18 feet above the floor. (If you haven't seen these the lamps have no heated elements - they are just spheres with a sulfer gas that is excited my microwaves from a magnetron. They have long life-times. I think they were invented at one of the national laboratories - LLNL I think. Here's a link to one of the vendors. <http://www.fusionlighting.com/index.htm> Just to be perfectly clear about this - beyond my interest in efficient lighting technology - I have nothing at all to do with the company. I do stand to gain from the adoption of efficient lighting systems since it uses fewer resources. Adam - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html