Vintage LEDs. Already.

In the LED heyday of 2011. With Jana.

Back in 2011 I wrote a book about LED lighting for photographers. Even though LEDs were more expensive and less efficient (and well color balanced) back then I was pretty sure they'd catch on. Four years down the road I'm on my third or fourth generation of LED lights. I am finding them more and more useful all the time. 

I recently photographed 20 people during a day of making images for a law firm. We were shooting on a rainy and overcast day and the building in which the law firm was housed sits right in the middle of Austin's downtown district. 

I was making portraits of people in offices with the shapes and textures of the city softly rendered outside the windows. A cityscape background made soft and somewhat surreal by the combination of aerial mist and quickly diminishing focus from the f2.8 setting on my 85mm lens.

The light in the offices (with the regular office lighting extinguished needed to be supplemented. I brought along three flashes but I also brought along five LED panels. Four of the 312AS lights and one of the 504AS lights. All of these units are marketed by Fotodiox and all feature the ability to adjust color temperature and output levels. I used the big light diffused through a 1/2 stop scrim for my main light and used the smaller lights for fill and accents. 

None of this would have worked on a sunny day. It it had been a brighter day I would have defaulted to the flashes and some umbrellas. But luck was on my side. The constant light source was a blessing since a lot of the people being photographed were nervous in front of the camera and a fair number told me that they were habitual camera blinkers. Not having the flash going off and cueing them to blink was great. The subjects were amazed when I would tell them that we got twenty or thirty great shots without a single blink.

In the same week I used some of the small LEDs for a video interview and I used the large LED to supplement ambient lighting for a video slider shot in a lab. One evening we had a power failure  here in our neighborhood, which is an extremely rare occurrence, and I brought in a case of the LEDs from the office and placed them all over the house. They ran for hours on their batteries and were still going strong when the power came back on. Later in the week I agreed to photograph a doctor here in the studio that had a tough schedule and needed to make his appointment with me after 9pm. 

We're in a residential area that doesn't believe in street lights so I wanted to make it easy for the doctor to find me in the dark. I put one LED on a small stand to light up the house number on the mail box out near the curb. I used another two lights to sweep the drive way with light and I used one light facing the studio to light up the small building's exterior. 

The doctor honed in on the location like an airplane following landing lights. 

I don't know if you've started to experiment with LEDs yet but now is a good time to start. Especially if you are interested in video production. The panels are cheaper and more consistent than ever before and the color just keeps getting better and better. With a good low light camera like the Nikon D610 it's almost as if there is no downside to their use. You won't freeze fast action with them but you can light up a portrait really well. 

When I look back at how big and primitive my first set of LEDs was I am pretty amazed at the progress the lighting industry has made. I just checked out the latest from Fiilex and I am convinced that if I have the budget I'll be making some additional investments in their products. Especially now that the big 500 series light is available. It's very clean and pure and kicks out the equivalent of a 750 watt tungsten spotlight. So very cool.