[Leica] Making studio lighting?

[philippe.orlent at pandora.be (Philippe Orlent)]

Kyle,
You might find some inspiration for it at http://www.dirkleunis.be, who
works with it regularely. You'll easily discover which shots are taken with
this kind of light.
Fluorescent (white, cold white, warm white, green cast, yellow cast, blue
cast, coloured) lights are used mostly for colour shootings: they give a
very nice, unreal light on your subject.
Experimenting with different kinds colour film (slides, not neg) gives
sometimes fantastic results.
You will need lots of tubes, though, to get enough light for adequate
shutter speeds. Make sure you can put them on one by one, to have some
playing margin. The photographers I worked with that use this kind of
illumination make portable sets themselves, that most of the time are hold
by their assistants.
Also: if used frontal (and a bit below)  for portraits, you get a very
fashion like, high brow light. The kind of light you see from time to time
in Vogue etc. which makes you ask: how did they do this? :)
Good luck with it: I am convinced that you will get fabulous results with
it, and that it will boost your photography (as if that is needed ;))

Other things to experiment with are:
illumination by a wall of television set, set to the "snow channel" It's a
bit softer light than the fluorescent technique;
portraits with ringflash;
building a man sized completely white cube with holes in each of the 8 sides
and putting people or objects in it. 7 of them to put your light sources
through, 1 for putting your lens through. It gives the effect of a shooting
in a snowy landscape, where you don't know where's top , bottom, left or
right any more: total desorientation so to speak.


> From: Kyle Cassidy <KCassidy@asc.upenn.edu>
> Reply-To: Leica Users Group <lug@leica-users.org>
> Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 14:30:04 -0400
> To: "'lug@leica-users.org'" <lug@leica-users.org>
> Subject: [Leica] Making studio lighting?
> 
> I've heard that some studios use a bank of flourescent lights to provide a
> softbox sort of illumination. Has anybody here done anything like this? Have
> examples you could post from both subject and consctruction angles? I'm
> working now on making my studio more permanent and actually building some
> lights in there is sounding like a good idea to me at the moment....
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