Massive softboxes

Just for fun, I enjoyed seeing this and thought it might be interesting to post here too.

Grand Central Terminal, NYC, January 29, 2011, ~12:30 PM. They were shooting a commercial for AT&T.

In each of the three open areas high above the floor, there was a searchlight-sized lamp shooting away from the floor, through a diffusion panel onto a massive white fabric reflector - maybe 50' (15 meters) square or more. These three enormous reflector panels were lighting the scene taking place down on the floor on the far side of Grand Central's main concourse.

A wide shot of the 3-story high "softboxes"

Those are Arri HMI daylight balanced lights shooting into a roll each of grid cloth (probably).

aroundlsu wrote in post #11743677
Those are Arri HMI daylight balanced lights shooting into a roll each of grid cloth (probably).

Do any photographers use HMI? I've read Peter Lindbergh uses HMI on photoshoots. Seems like you can create some amazing lighting like golden hour sun effect etc with HMI. Prob cost prohibitive for most, why are they so darn expensive lol? Any cheap starter HMI's uner $2K?

Profoto just came out with some cool HMI lights designed for photography. But under $2k? No way.

I have shot under plenty of HMI lighting (I work on movies) and they are not really anything you can't do the same thing with strobes. If you want a sunrise effect add a fresnel lens and some half straw gel to your strobes.

The real problem is the only HMI lights that will plug into standard household 120 are the 1200 pars. Everything else requires a generator and people that know what they are doing to set it up. Just the light stand for the Arri 18k HMI costs $5k!

aroundlsu wrote in post #11746045
Profoto just came out with some cool HMI lights designed for photography. But under $2k? No way.

I have shot under plenty of HMI lighting (I work on movies) and they are not really anything you can't do the same thing with strobes. If you want a sunrise effect add a fresnel lens and some half straw gel to your strobes.

The real problem is the only HMI lights that will plug into standard household 120 are the 1200 pars. Everything else requires a generator and people that know what they are doing to set it up. Just the light stand for the Arri 18k HMI costs $5k!

I read about the Profoto HMI but no mention of price. $5k just for the stand, insane. Suspect video/movie guys laugh when still photogs whine about equipment cost lol. Thx for the info