your ideal tools for Painting with Light

In the process of painting with light I have tried many things from dinky little flashlights to lasers and flashes.

Overall I would like to transition to using LEDs all the time because I appreciate their run time and their durability above incandescents. Kind of like a fluorescent, the LEDs use phosphors to try to broaden their output in the visible spectrum and they've done a lot to trick us in to believing they're a lot more like daylight. The problem with most LEDs is their poor color rendition, even if they have a tint that looks "daylight" or "warmish" to us (most people don't like the blue tint as far as how it makes color look) they still have such an uneven spectral emission that they don't generally render colors well.

What I've been looking for is something up the ante, with longer run time than my 2 million candlepower spotlight which is good for somewhere on the order of 20ish minutes before it needs a recharge.

I've got a number of 3 watt LED flashlights of different types and qualities (in all aspects, especially output & color rendition). One of the best is probably the Malkoff mod I got a year and a half ago for my 4D cell maglite.

Has anyone had any experience with LED flashlights and any they'd recommend with particularly high output. The Malkoff mod is rated for 240ish lumens (out the front) and I'm seeing a lot now (like the Fenix TK40 which looks tempting, I love my LD20) hitting 630-700 lumens allowing me slightly more exposure times at low ISO and small apertures.

I still use flash whenever I can too, but flashlights do provide a different look in the finished product.

I've been using the white CREE 250 lumen LED's for about the last 18 months. I have 12 led's in 4 cicuits, ie 3 led's per circuit. Each circuit can be indiviually controlled for brightness or switched off altogether. The unit runs from a 24 volt Sealed Lead Acid battery and is hand held quite comfortably.

With all 12 LED's it's way brighter than I need however I attach softboxes to the front and when using a 1 metre softbox the 12 LED's are needed and still allow me a F11 exposure at ISO 100. I normally use it with 2 strings of LED's running and either a small softbox or no softbox at all and this gives me F8-11 at ISO 100.

In terms of colour balance I find it to be excellent, especially in my circumstances where I'm shooting cars at night and often near Metal Halide lights which have a slightly green tinge to them. The CREE is almost pure white but has a very small green balance, about 4 units of green in Capture One Pro, which coincidently matches well with Metal Halide. I find that a lot of people shooting cars with constant light sources often desaturate the background, presumably to hide serious colour balance issues. I've never had to do that.

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rigshots wrote in post #9652958
It was quite expensive to build but there was nothing else on the market that could do what I wanted. The light has become a part of the tool kit and has been very reliable and tough.

JJ

Thanks for the feedback, I wasn't sure if I was wandering off the deep end here and might not hear anything for a while!

That's quite the rig you've got, but it obviously works! I'm looking for more portability than that offers and I'm willing to trade total runtime (and compare to your rig some power I'm sure) to make it something I won't mind carrying around with me regularly.

I'm suspecting it may come down to a few candidates but I'll just have to pick one and try it and see. I would like something fairly rugged and to that extent I don't particularly trust myself to cobble it together I'm liking your method with the soft boxes, I do things like that too. No reason that a flashlight can't be used with light modifiers!

One reason I like the Fenix is its versatility though. It can function as a sane flashlight with low to reasonable output levels but can really put some light out there if I need it for painting or other things and can handle diffusion and other things well since it has so much output.

Hopefully some other portable continuous light aficionados will show up!

well, I use an LED light for navigating around in the dark, and use a standard maglite and manual canon flash for spraying light. Never bothered with LEDs because what I got works, and LEDs have weird colored light, so never researched finding an LED with predictable color temp.

that probably doesn't help, does it?