A quick update on this thread
I bought a SB R1 kit plus an additional SB R200
They work fine with an SB900 as the master
I sometimes use a second SB 900 as a back light
105 macro on a D800

the only full spectrum daylight bulbs i have been able to track down here in new zealand, are philips graphica pro fluorescent tubes.

It looks like i will most likely install them in my studio so i wont have to worry about colour casts on the monitor or prints. they're not very expensive, and should last for a while.

Here in the UK we mostly use Halogen bulbs rather than CFLs nowadays. They're widely available so, presumably, meet the more stringent energy requirements.

They're also known as Tungsten Halogen bulbs or Quartz Iodine bulbs. They work with dimmer switches. As far as I know, they've been used for car headlights for years.

I'm not an expert, but Wikipedia says -

"Like all incandescent light bulbs, a halogen lamp produces a continuous spectrum of light, from near ultraviolet to deep into the infrared. Since the lamp filament can operate at a higher temperature than a non-halogen lamp, the spectrum is shifted toward blue, producing light with a higher effective color temperature."

The camera's auto white balance seems to cope pretty well.

Just be grateful we're no longer using film!

Willis said:
CFL's are crap. LED is actually kind of exciting. They are doing quite a few interesting things things with them. In the future, our cameras won't have a white balance setting... our light switches will. :)

Kirk Tuck says some of the newer LCD lights have adjustable WB settings which allows you to adjust them to match your ambient light and use fill lighting rather than having to completely blast the ambient light out of the picture.

CFL's are crap. LED is actually kind of exciting. They are doing quite a few interesting things things with them. In the future, our cameras won't have a white balance setting... our light switches will. :)

Ter Roshak said:
here in germany they are talking about a longer phase out because the CFLS have very high mercury levels and wouldn't be good to the environment too..
but i also stock up my light bulb reservoir at home :)

the energy level consumed by lightbulbs of overall total energy cost every year is about 1-10% so i think the most important factor is the friendship between the cfls producers and the politcians..
cfls tend to be more secure but.. it's a lobby thing.

The mercury is a problem that was completely overlooked by the government. If you break one of the CFLs you are officially supposed to call a HazMat team to clean it up...yea, right! There is no provision whatsoever for turning in the old ones for appropriate disposal so they will, no doubt, be going in the landfill.

The ones I have seen so far are of indifferent light quality at the very best. IMO this is not a mature technology and has not been well though out.

Do the smd-5050 work for face wrinkles?
I saw some 12v led lighting on the Dr. Oz show, led "flexible strip" I can't remember the name of it, does anyone know?
I heard these lights work for increasing the collagen to reduce or eliminate wrinkles. Has anyone used one of these at home? Do they work? Which works best if any?

we use an led bulb that when put in a recessed light you can't tell the difference between it and an incandescent. plus, its fully dimmable. sucks its 90$ usd a bulb...

In Oz plain incandescants were phased out a while ago. Halogen types are still available for now but will be phased out eventually.

Dimmable CFL's are available from Phillips and work quite well. None of the CFL's get down to 2-3k colour temp, but "warm" versions are available, round about 4k.

LED's are making inroads here as they are more efficient than CFL's. Price needs to reduce and lumens output need to increase.

jonnyapple said:
I don't think it's just scientists that use the convention that higher temperature = hotter, but I was just messing with you, anyway. It is counterintuitive because we grow up thinking of blue as cool and red as hot.

You say "potato," I say . . .

I don't think it's just scientists that use the convention that higher temperature = hotter, but I was just messing with you, anyway. It is counterintuitive because we grow up thinking of blue as cool and red as hot.

edit: And that's not even mentioning how much more screwed up it gets when you talk about what white balancing does on a camera, where increasing the kelvin temperature of the light source has your camera compensate for the extra blue (high energy) light that would be given off by a black-body emitter by decreasing the higher-energy blue channel relative to the red channel. This gives a "warmer" picture even though your telling it your light source is "cooler" (more blue, which actually is the same as saying hotter). I'd better stop confusing myself right now.

jonnyapple said:
I think you mean 1000 degrees hotter (more blue).

We say, "cooler," (e.g., "more blue") when referring to higher numeric color temperatures ("wrong" as that may be to you "black-box" scientist types!).

jonnyapple said:

I haven't had much luck white balancing with CFLs, but from your comments I'm thinking maybe I just don't have the right type!

I generally try to find the highest-color temperature lamps I can find in a particular product. We are only using two CFLs, temporarily (we're remodeling both baths--these will be replaced with 6,500K T5s or LEDs), and they were rated somewhere around 6,500K.

studio460 said:
...They all white balance fine, even on the preset daylight settings on my cameras (even though they're 1,000 degrees cooler).

I think you mean 1000 degrees hotter (more blue).

I haven't had much luck white balancing with CFLs, but from your comments I'm thinking maybe I just don't have the right type!

Drab said:
. . . more mercury is released to the environment through burning the coal to illuminate an incandescent bulb's delta power usage than is contained in the CFL itself!

Good point.

fell_brook said:
you'll still be able to buy incandescents here in the states. they'll just be called specialty bulbs. that's what my local electrical supply house told me.

Most likely, true. There are several specialty lighting supply houses in L.A. which service the movie industry. I imagine photo-balanced incandescents (as well as regular household incandescents) will be around for a while for those gaffers that require them (expensive, and last only a few hours). We have a couple cases of those at work.

jonnyapple said:
Drab, the ballasts in CFLs have to be small and because of that I believe they're all electronic and are typically in the 1-2kHz range and not the mains frequency. I just shot 4 images of one at 1/8000 s shutter speed and didn't see much brightness variation if any. My guess is the phosphors' fluorescence doesn't decay much before the next high voltage pulse. (See, Niko? So much photo relatedness!)

We have 6,500-degree Kelvin, LEDs, T5s, T8s, and a couple T12s throughout the house, and in all of our outdoor and landscape lighting fixtures. The fluorescents all appear to be 60Hz, but I'm not sure. The LED's frequency appears to be higher (or, lower) than 60 Hz. They all white-balance fine, even on the preset daylight settings on my cameras (even though they're 1,000 degrees cooler). The super-white color rendition, lowered heat generation, and overall energy savings, are all big pluses to me.

There was talk earlier this year that LED bulbs would replace the CFLs once they get the white balance right. There are also more surprises in store; ie. they're talking about LED's in curtains and walls so that we won't have single points of illumination in rooms any more.

I think one of the closer versions are curtains that have solar panels on the outside to gather power and then use that power on led lights on the inside to light the room.

Lighting is set to get all weird over the next decade.

Here's the light emitting wallpaper story - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8434705.stm - it was a year ago.

Here's the LED light bulb - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7860115.stm - I'm not sure if you need to be in the UK to see the video

that is exactly my point in starting this thread, but it is a great way to think of it, that a huge softbox far enough away with enough power can become hard -- the sun!

I don't like them. They don't want nasty stuff in our landfills, yet they push these bulbs on us. If you break one you have to be very careful due to the mercury in them.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp

elvishefer said:
My D800 better have a LED lightbulb white balance setting!

/shakes_fist

;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_lamp

The times, they are a-changin'.

+1 on that one!!!!!

Last friends wedding - LED lit center pieces & Candle's both for lighting at tables, incandescent lighting on the edge of the room with florescent tubes over the wedding party with the same LED & Candle lit center pieces. Even converting to BW they all look like blotchy goblins. Thank god I was just a friend and wasn't getting paid for that one.

you'll still be able to buy incandescents here in the states. they'll just be called specialty bulbs. that's what my local electrical supply house told me.

cfls are just a stepping stone for leds which I wish would hurry up in coming down in price.

Thats a good point studio. One that to be honest took me a long time to get. Even if you use a "soft light" lets say a shoot through umbrella if it is very far away with a high powered flash it might still come acrossas a hard light.

I hate that I cant dim my cfl.s. ...ah that way my photos look that much better=)

NikoDoby said:
I think you're stretching the photography related angle on this jonny. You might want to post this in a Home Depot or Lowe's forum instead.

I can honestly say that I was only thinking photo-related here, but if you want to close it go ahead. It's not one of my resolutions to not have any threads closed this year. ;-)

I guess I was wondering whether someone would say photographers are exempt from the phase-out because incandescents are so much easier to white balance for—just bring in your SLR to prove you actually need the traditional style. I love being one of those cocky photographer guys.

Drab, the ballasts in CFLs have to be small and because of that I believe they're all electronic and are typically in the 1-2kHz range and not the mains frequency. I just shot 4 images of one at 1/8000 s shutter speed and didn't see much brightness variation if any. My guess is the phosphors' fluorescence doesn't decay much before the next high voltage pulse. (See, Niko? So much photo relatedness!)

My D800 better have a LED lightbulb white balance setting!

/shakes_fist

;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_lamp

The times, they are a-changin'.

Ter Roshak said:
here in germany they are talking about a longer phase out because the CFLS have very high mercury levels and wouldn't be good to the environment too..

Which is funny because it seems like Germany burns about as much (percentage wise) coal as we do in the USA, and more mercury is released to the environment through burning the coal to illuminate an incandescent bulb's delta power usage than is contained in the CFL itself!

here in germany they are talking about a longer phase out because the CFLS have very high mercury levels and wouldn't be good to the environment too..
but i also stock up my light bulb reservoir at home :)

the energy level consumed by lightbulbs of overall total energy cost every year is about 1-10% so i think the most important factor is the friendship between the cfls producers and the politcians..
cfls tend to be more secure but.. it's a lobby thing.