Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Digital Cameras & Shooting Techniques => Topic started by: rsmith on November 12, 2008, 05:50:26 pm

Title: Continuous lighting for high speed camera
Post by: rsmith on November 12, 2008, 05:50:26 pm
I need a lighting set up for a high speed camera that will be arriving shortly and I am fairly new to continuous lighting.

I have been told LED panels are generally well suited for this application because of good lighting output without any chance of flicker. If anyone can give guidance into a setup or resources that talk about this kind of lighting it would be much appreciated.

We will be shooting from a macro level up to medium size product with frame rates ranging from 200 fps to upwards of 10,000 fps
Title: Continuous lighting for high speed camera
Post by: Chris_Brown on November 14, 2008, 09:27:08 am
Quote from: rsmith
We will be shooting from a macro level up to medium size product with frame rates ranging from 200 fps to upwards of 10,000 fps
10,000 fps means your exposure is a bit shorter to allows for the mechanics of the film gate to open & close. This means an effective exposure time of 1/12,000 second. Another parameter is your aperture. Shooting macro requires a smaller aperture due to the shorter depth of field, so let's assume f8. Another parameter is ISO, which you did not indicate. But given the first two parameters, you're gonna need high sensitivity, at least ISO800. Lastly, the strength of the light will depend on its distance to the subject, and this is totally subjective since each object will be lit to enhance its appearance. A 10K light can be placed farther from the object than a 5K light.

Will you light the objects for beauty of simply to be able to record them?
Title: Continuous lighting for high speed camera
Post by: edwinb on November 22, 2008, 02:49:00 pm
Quote from: rsmith
I need a lighting set up for a high speed camera that will be arriving shortly and I am fairly new to continuous lighting.

I have been told LED panels are generally well suited for this application because of good lighting output without any chance of flicker. If anyone can give guidance into a setup or resources that talk about this kind of lighting it would be much appreciated.

We will be shooting from a macro level up to medium size product with frame rates ranging from 200 fps to upwards of 10,000 fps

leds will flicker if you have noisy power supplies.
the colour of the leds is quite bizarre with some,  it can be something akin to a number of narrow band colours mixed to give white approximation,
varying the current, certainly at the higher end of the spec can distort the color.
try to test a sample. machine vision units can be optained quite easily which go around the lens for close up work that would probably work very well
 lake image systems seem to be professional in this area (http://www.lakeimage.co.uk/) I get their regular newsletters with a range of developing products
Edwin
Title: Continuous lighting for high speed camera
Post by: michaelnotar on November 24, 2008, 04:51:11 pm
we used 4-750 lowel tota lights tungsten about 1-2ft from the subject with a fantom 4 camera and we ran it from 1k-64k fps, that will just about to do. i would also recommend 1-2kw tungsten fresnals/floods cuz they wont need distribution, just plug in the a wall outlet. good hmi on a flicker free ballist which seems to be the norm these days would be even better but more expensive. they produce 4x the light of a similiar wattage tungsten light, ie a 1.2k hmi = the light from a tungsten 5k and only uses 10amps here in the US.