What's the deal with LEDs?

Have you noticed there are a lot more LEDs on the market today? 10 years ago LEDs were barely a blip on the lighting radar. Now, there are tons of them out there, in all different shapes, sizes, and power configurations. So let’s talk about LEDs. Why are they becoming more popular?

Also in the Godox and MoLight news section of this episode: I announce the new FS Series of Flexible Fabric LEDs from Godox and the good news that the Rolling ScrimFlector is back in stock!

Please like and follow the podcast Facebook page and join my Facebook group.

Transcript

female announcer: 0:03

Live from mo lights studios in the heartland of America, it's your Monday morning jolt of hot photography tips with a frothy topping of the latest product news from Godox. Mo light and more. Welcome to the Monday morning cup of Mo with your host the man who put the MO in MoLight Michael Mowbray.

Michael Mowbray: 0:27

Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning cup of Mo. I'm your host, Michael Mowbray. Each week I pour a cup of coffee and explore a single topic related to professional photography. So thank you so much for joining me. The topic this week LEDs. Have you noticed there are a lot more LEDs on the market today. 10 years ago, LEDs were barely a blip on the lighting radar. A matter of fact, I can't remember anything about LEDs 10 years ago. Now there are tons of them out there. And they're in all different shapes and sizes and power configurations. So let's talk a little bit about LEDs. Why are they becoming so popular? But first, let me share a dirty secret with you. Yeah, it's not that dirty. Majority of my studio work over the past two years has been lit with LEDs. Now you might find that shocking as I'm known as a Flash guy, or even as a speed light guy. But despite teaching about speed lights for many years, and having written two best selling books on speed lights, I actually haven't been a big speed light user the last four or five years when Godox introduced more powerful battery powered flashes, I naturally upgraded to them. So I think of myself more as purely a lighting guy. And I will definitely use the tools that I think will help me best and most easily execute the vision I have for shoot or a particular photo and easily is a key word because why make anything more difficult than it needs to be especially I've been around for a while I've had a photography studio for 25 years if you count my part time studio, so I've been doing this a long time, I have no need to make anything more difficult than it needs to be. Why do I use LEDs? Primarily in the studio? It's just playing easy. What you see is what you get. So if you're trying to build a lighting ratio, or get a specific lighting pattern, which I you know, I guess we're trying to do with every shot, right, you can see what you're what you're getting right into cameras, especially now with today's live view cameras, you're seeing what you're getting. So that's really important. I think LEDs have made that even easier. So you might naturally ask them why were you using Flash exclusively for so many years? And that's a fair question. The simple reason is that LEDs and other continuous light sources really weren't viable 10 years ago. Until recently, LEDs have had bad 10th problems and where we can power and in many cases pretty expensive as well. So hey, why don't I pay a lot of money for something that's going to give me bad color and make me have to use a really high ISO CI, probably not no. For LEDs to become more viable as an option they needed to improve in three areas for me, one color accuracy to power and three cost. So let me address color accuracy first. In recent years LED manufacturers have made great strides in creating very colored accurate LEDs. And there are two major technical measurements used to measure color accuracy in the industry. And you may see this when you're looking for LEDs you'll see these ratings one's called CRI, and one's called tlci CRI is color rendering index. This is the most common rating you will see. In general, I recommend only looking at LEDs that are rated at a CRI of 95 or higher. Many are rated at 96 or 97 Plus, including most of the LEDs offered by Godox and Golden Eagle. That second rating I mentioned is television lighting consistency index tlci. In my opinion, this is a better measurement of how accurately a light will render color as it measures reproduction of 24 different colors. CRI is 16 tlci is 24 different colors. If you look at the tlci chart, it looks very much like a Macbeth color checker or McBeth passport chart. Very color accurate LEDs will score 96 or higher using tlci and again Godox and Golden Eagle LEDs pass the tlci test easily. But to me with any lighting the proof is in the pudding. How do you put proof in Pudding by the way? Now I want pudding. what sold me on using LEDs was that I could set my Sony A seven R three to a white balance of 56 on Okay, just leave it there. And I can shoot a headshot using my Golden Eagle LEDs, which are the ones I use most in studio, I can pull the raw file into Capture One and not have to do any color correction, it comes in clean. Now what that allows me to do is make artistic color corrections. Rather than fixing issues. Those are two big differences, I may choose to warm it up a little bit, or I may choose to do something else with it. But starting with a very clean color accurate file is a huge time saver. And it gives me great peace of mind because I know what I'm going to get every time I put that combination together. So color accuracy is one component check. The next is power. But before we get into the details of LED power, first, let me clear up a misunderstanding about power, especially when comparing continuous lights like LEDs compared with flashes, first, a 200 watt LED will not output the same amount of light as a 200 watt second flash, two totally different things, apples and oranges. So two very, very different things when it comes to actual light output. The watt or watt second ratings just state how much power is available to use. And it makes it very difficult to compare. For example, just staying on the flash side, comparing one manufacturers flashes to another because you may get something that is a 600 watt second flash. And you may find that the actual output is vastly different between two different manufacturers. That's because there's efficiency of use of that power. How does it transfer through the capacitors? How does it get released into the bulb? How efficient is the bulb? How efficient is the design? What I have found, however, is that Godox is pretty clean. I've tested other lights, I've had other manufacturers who want more light to carry their stuff. Send me sample lights. I remember one I won't name the manufacturer because I don't want to throw them under the bus. But they sent me a 500 watt second flash. I tested it, I put a light meter on it. And I'm like, Huh, that's full power. That doesn't seem right. So I did a bunch more tests on it full power, what I found is that it performed like a 200 Watts second flash from Godox. So there's 500 Watts second flash from manufacturer X gave me the same amount of light output as a Godox at 200. Wow, big difference. So let's not get too wrapped up in the whole lot. Second thing. Okay, I can tell you in the Godox lineup again, as I mentioned, they're very clean, they're very efficient in how they output the power. And as you go from one flash to the other, they're very linear. So at 400 Pro will put out twice as much light as in at 200 Pro, and an 8600 promo put out 50% more light than an 8400 Pro are there abouts really close, so as far as linear as you can get. So that part is good. But let's bring this all back to comparing flashes and LEDs. Again remember Watts and watt seconds tell you how much power is available available to be used. The power driving an LED has to continuously drive those LEDs to keep them lit. Whereas a flash, the power gets sent to a capacitor, which stores the energy and releases it to ignite the gas in a flash tube to create a quick burst of light that lasts a fraction of a second. Because it essentially creates a mini explosion that only lasts a fraction of a second, the effect of light output for that fraction of a second is far greater than the light output that can be generated from a continuous light source using the same amount of available power. This may sound super technical, but trust me I'm really oversimplifying this to help make a comparison. The bottom line is LEDs have far less light output than a flash. So how do we deal with that? Or how do we combat that first for your main light be sure that you're using a powerful LED like a 200 watt or a 300 watt cob style cob see OB stands for chip on board. You've seen these they look like monoliths. They actually look like bigger studio flashes they have one big round LED on the front. And that is the most efficient and tends to be the most powerful type of LEDs that are out there. So use one of those as your main light. Second, use a higher ISO. I shoot most of my LED work at ISO 800 Now, some of you out there may be listening in horror. Oh my gosh. How hideous What about the noise noise noise, you know, stop it really get over it. It's 2020 to the set. on the Sony cameras and many other cameras as well Fuji and so on, deliver a very clean file at ISO 800 for gosh sakes we're not shooting very color film anymore, or Canon 20 D, you all have to get over this weird I can only shoot at ISO 100 mentality it's it's really no longer relative. So just please stop. By using a higher powered LED and a higher ISO I can shoot headshots at settings like one 120/5 Or one 100 and 60th of a second 5.6 at ISO 800 That's perfect for headshots perfect for the way I shoot headshots at least, if I need to shoot products, I can drop my shutter speed way down in order to get f 11 Or even F 16 if needed. And say I want to shoot products at ISO 200 Because maybe it is going to be used great big giant and it's got to be super, super clean. And the native ISO on Sony's I believe is 160. So maybe I want to shoot it isO 160 As long as that product isn't moving, and I'm using a tripod or in my case, a rock solid camera stand. I can shoot this out of pretty slow shutter speed and I have no worries. But what about moving subjects you may ask like kids or pets simple. Use flash seriously. Some would say why not use an even bigger LED like a 600 watt or 1000 watt LED one that provide even more light? Well, yes, it would. But the problem is how much continuous light your subject can tolerate. Personally, I have found anything over 300 Watts tends to be more than many people can handle, it tends to make them squint, it's too much light. So you have to find that happy medium. So to me, a 200 watt or 300 Watt cop style LED in a double diffuse softbox is just right for using for portraiture because it gives me a nice big soft light, I got enough power, especially if I use ISO 800 to get a reasonable shutter speed and get a nice clean file. The last criteria is price. Finally, there are powerful color accurate LEDs that are available at budget friendly prices. My favorite Cobb style LED is the LED 2000 from Golden Eagle. The recent released by color version of this is on sale right now at MoLight for 419. So just keep that in mind. Hey, support our sponsor. The one style dragon light from the same manufacturer is just 135 and even the Godox one that can create virtually any RGB color, that's something else we want to talk about with LEDs. By the way, you can create virtually any RGB color with the LC 500 are from Godox. That's just 239. So we're talking you know down there and the range of lower price flashes, so comparable to things that you might already be buying. There are a few other intangibles that also make LEDs attractive. I mentioned by color with the new LED 2000 from Golden Eagle, which means that you can dial in your white balance from tungsten to daylight that comes in really handy. If you're shooting on location and you've got something that's coming in really warm and you're trying to try to incorporate the ambient light, you can dial in to match that ambient light color using your LED. Whereas with a strobe or a flash, you're going to have to gel it. And you have to get the right combination of gels well with the LED by color LED if I if I had been there, and it's one that's more like 3500 degrees Kelvin, I can dial in 3500 degrees Kelvin, you know, I don't have to use CTL plus a quarter CTL or whatever, to try to get that exact color. So that's an advantage that LEDs have. And now some even offer a full spectrum of RGB colors, which negates the need to use gels all together. This can lead to a lot of creativity and you don't have to worry about having the right gel to match. You don't have to go out and buy a 70,000 100. Rosco or lead gel just to make sure you've got the right color to match a dress or whatever, you can just dial it in. I've got the Godox s z 150 are set up on a wall mount boom. And my studio is aimed at the set where I usually use a studio gray background. And I can flip this thing on using my phone by the way because it's got a Bluetooth app. And I can dial in whatever color I want on the background. So I have a a client come in with a jewel green sweater, I can match it or say I want to use a complementary color. Well I can get the complementary color to whatever color they're wearing. And I can dial it in right on the app on my phone and visually see what color is hitting. Oh my gosh. That's amazing. So there are some great advantages of some of the newer LEDs. Bottom line can LEDs be a good fit for you. Possibly. At least now it's a viable option for many photographers. Here's the latest news from Godox and MoLight. Godox recently announced a new flexible LED light called the FL series. What makes these LEDs unique are their form factor. They are attached to a flexible fabric that can be easily rolled up or bent and twisted into shapes and making super portable very handy for taking on location. And it could be the basis for a nice portable LED headshots setup. The FL series comes in four different sizes 30 centimeter by 120 centimeter strip that's comparable to a one foot by four foot strip, a 60 by 60 square, a 40 by 60 and 30 by 45 rectangle. So by the way, if you guys are always confused with this whole metric and inch thing because you know here in the US we still haven't really adopted metric, there are two and a half centimeters per inch. So you can always take whatever center meter measurement you've got and divided by two and a half and you get the the amount of inches there you go. Just you know learn just something else today. You can take these and you can splice two or more panels together if you need a bigger light source, which is very cool. Plus these are by color from 3300 to 5600 degrees. And they can be powered by a C or a V mount battery. So again, handy for on location, you can use batteries with these. And they can be operated remotely using that Godox Bluetooth app I was mentioning earlier. So it's got all the all the pieces and parts, I think you want a need for a location LED. So MoLight does have several sizes of the FL LEDs on board on order I should say not here yet. And their arrival is expected by early February. Prices will range from 279 to 399. On the FL series and other news from MoLight. The rolling scrim Fletcher is finally back in stock. It's one of the favorite products of MoLight. And one of the favorite products of just about all of our customers who have bought one because it is an unusual tool and something I've been looking for for 20 years. It's a big, lightweight rolling scrim slash reflector. So I've seen a lot of people who have built like rolling reflector walls or rolling the flats. This thing is a fraction of the weight of trying to build something out of wood. And it can be taken apart and you could take it on location, although it's that simple to do that. But it's very easy to move around the studio. It's very lightweight, I mean just easily pick it up and move it if you need to, or rolls so are simply rolled in place and use it as a scrim or add the reflector material and use it as a white or silver reflector. Or use the black fabric that's on the other side of the silver reflector and use it for subtractive light. You can put the scrim behind your subject and lighter from behind for a fast high key look, which is what I do for headshots all the time. You know how much of a pain it is to if you're if you're shooting a mid key headshot, and then all of a sudden you're like, Oh, the client says, Oh, I would like some of these in white too, then you got to try to set up a white sweep or white wall and you gotta light it just right. No, you take the scrim Flector with just the scrim on it the white scrim, put it behind the subject, put a put a flash or an LED in a softbox behind it, crank it up, meter it, make sure it's you know, a stopping third or stopping a quarter you know stronger than your main. And you've got a high key look. Okay, you can put the black side behind a subject and now you've got a black background. Or you can clip a smaller background or clap one to the top of this thing. Oh, and by the way, it rotates and pivots. So there's a center piece that allows you to make this thing horizontal Oh, it'll raise up to about eight and a half feet. So you can put her overhead if you want to. It's great for using for product shots as the way I use a lot for product shots. If I want some nice soft overhead light, I will boom a light and a softbox typically an LED again, and then I'll put this scrim this rolling scrim flatter horizontally in between the softbox and the product. And then now I have an even bigger softer light source. It's got so many uses uses and applications. It's really no wonder that we have a hard time keeping them in stock. So check them out. now@www.go molight.com That's the rolling scrim Flecker. You're going to find it in the reflector in scrim category. It's also listed in the commercial product category for studio per student for commercial studios there that's what I'm trying to say. bloodletters Thank you again for joining me for a Monday morning cup of Mo, please subscribe and follow, please. I will also be posting more information on the podcast Facebook page. So be sure to follow that as well, which is really interesting because Facebook now has podcast pages. And you can actually stream the podcast through the Facebook page, which we are doing. You can listen to this on your favorite podcast app. You can listen to this on our podcast website. Or you can listen to this through your the Facebook page, so works only with mobile, but it's just another way that we can reach out and have you guys participate and learn a little bit through the Monday morning couple mouths so please join the Monday morning cup of Mo podcast group where you can ask questions suggest topics and join the rest of the community as we grow this thing together. Talk to you next week.