Testing, Testing, 1,2,3, DIY LED Lights

So I’m always looking to expand and find new and different ways to photograph my clients other than the standard headshot on a white or grey background with a strobe set up. I’ve been wanting a Kino Flo set up a few years, but, hey. Those things are uber expensive, but I understand why. They’ve been used by the tv and film industry for a long time, I know because my husband is an editor, and also he’s uber handy. Did I use the word uber again?

Okay, so Kino Flo is actually a company based in Burbank, CA, which is close to where we used to live and they started around 1987. They’re main lighting are fluorescent tube lighting that don’t flicker because of a high-frequency ballast tubes, and which contained a number of special phosphors designed to eliminate tints in the magenta-green spectrum which are present in most domestic fluorescent lights. So basically they are daylight balanced lights that are lightweight, and easy to carry around that are perfectly suited for filming. If you go on a tv set, you’ll see them hanging.

Now, LED lighting is all over the place, they last longer, and aren’t made of glass. So, David, the handy guy I married, made one panel of LED “Kino Flo” lights that have a high-frequency ballast type of system. I don’t know too much of all the work he did with it, or the technical details, but he and I are pretty happy with the results we got. We still need to tweak the system a little, but here are some test shots: