Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“How many digital photographers does it take to change a light bulb? They can’t, there isn’t enough light unless they use flash.”— Ray Bromley,
When used for portraiture, how much light output is a single LED light bulb going to produce? I screwed a 9W (60 Watt-equivalent) Philips LED light bulb into the inexpensive ($49.95) Gary Fong’s Lightbulb Adapter kit, measured ten feet and took an incident meter reading with my Gossen Luna-Star F2 meter set at ISO 400. The resultant exposure reading was 1/15 sec with an aperture between f/1.4 and f/2. So it’s obvious you’re going to have to use faster lenses, kick up the ISO and move the light closer to the subject.
Even doing all three of those things I found myself shooting near wide open when using two different f/1.8 lenses ultimately increasing the ISO at 800. When shooting with cameras that have better high ISO performance, you should be able to exceed that but you might want to do a few tests to find the maximum amount of noise you’re willing to tolerate before photographing anything important.
Setting up the Lightbulb Adapter Kit is as simple as screwing in a light bulb. And you can use it that way. LED light bulb are supposed to produce “true-to-life skin tones” but images made with a Canon EOS 60D set in AWB mode produced noticeably warm tones. Your camera and another setting might be different so as always make time for testing. I looked at the light source through a spectrascope and saw that while the color spectrum of the bulb was indeed smooth, with no gaps, but it was more compressed than other LED light sources I’ve tested.
How I Made this Portrait: For this portrait of the always amazing Pam Simpson, I added a second Gary Fong Lightbulb Adapter Kit and a adjustable color LED light bulb (from Home Depot) that was set to magenta behind the subject. It created a dramatic look that if I didn’t know was created with two light bulbs, wouldn’t believe it from looking at the image. Camera used was a Canon EOS 60D with my go-to portrait lens (for DSLRs) EF 85mm f/1.8 USM lens with an exposure of 1/50 sec at f/1.8 and ISO 800.