I saw a little of a demonstration of Wescott's fluorscent Spiderlights, a 2'x3' softbox with five fluorscent bulbs in it. It was very interesting, I'm thinking of it for tabletop/product/food? Has anyone used these bulbs for this, the light looked very clean.
Also for a constant source for portraits, I like to shoot with a lot of Bokeh and higher shutter speed for a type of thing I'm doing a lot of with available light where I don't really pose them, I get them in the general position and then start them talking, trying to get non-posed natural responses but sometimes have to fire pretty fast and don't want to worry about recycle time but more than that, I'll forgo fstop for a faster shutter speed, often finding that 1/640th second works nicely if their head is moving quite a bit. It's kind of a situation where I'm letting them be out of control within parameters. Anyway it's working but I'm at the mercy of the light so often, using window light or in the shade alongside a home or building and could plug in something constant where I wouldn't have to worry about sync speed on the camera.
I don't mind shooting at ISO 400 with my 5D with these and shooting at an f2.8-3.5 and sometimes do it with the 85L all the way open to 1.2 only doing less of that lately.
I loose a lot of shots this way but it always pays off nicely with pretty responsive expressions and it's really, really fun and rewarding.
I think the Westcott rep said the softbox with bulbs was only around $350 and if it would work for table top as well it would be a simple answer to several projects I've in mind. I'd like to leave a tabletop setup up in my apartment all the time and this wouldn't be a big draw on the electrical like hot lights or on the pocket like strobes.
