Get More Out of Your Portable Light

by Johnnie BehiriJuly 27^th, 2017

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In our latest episode of cinema5D essentials, Li-Lian and Johnnie discuss what to look for when choosing a portable LED light and how to get more out of it. For this episode, we used Blind Spot Gear’s new Tile Light as a “representative” of the portable light family.

Of course we took the opportunity to take a closer look at this new Tile Light and came up with a solid conclusion. I hope you will take a moment to look at our new cinema5D essentials episode and find out what it is.

Lab Results

We also tested the Blind Spot Gear Tile Light in our test lab with the Asensetek Lighting Passport. This smart spectrometer allows us to measure several key aspects about the light quality coming from LED fixtures.

Blind Spot Gear Tile Light LED – Average of half and maximum light output.

Blind Spot Gear Tile Light LED – Measured with CTO Gel

What we see is that the CRI holds up well in daylight configuration, with a value of about 93. You can see the exact values for each color in the chart above. This means that the lights have a mostly accurate light spectrum according to today’s standards, and will look not very far off to actual sunlight on camera, which is especially valuable when recording skin tones and white surfaces. Unfortunately with the CTO (correction to orange) gel attached, it is a different story and the light is not very accurate, both in terms of color temperature, as well as actual color quality.

Portable Lights

In our opinion, the following attributes should be considered when choosing a portable light:

• Ideally it should be portable,
• dimmable,
• diffusible,
• bi-coloured,
• with a strong light output, so it can be used for a variety of purposes.
• It should be durable,
• and you should have the choice to power it either by battery or by mains.
• There should be a 1/4″ thread, so you can attach it to a camera or a light stand.

Which small portable lights is your favorite one, that needs to be mentioned here? Let us know in the comment sectio nbelow.

Enjoy the new episode and don’t forget to support our new initiative by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Music for this episode was kindly provided by Art List.