LED panel

eoglyn

Anybody use a small on or off camera LED panel for still photography lighting, for events, for weddings or anything at all?

I've seen people include them in their kits, but not seen very much info on how they are being used or their advantages.

I see a few examples on amazon going in price from £25 to hundreds, i know you can vary the colour temperature on some, which would appear to be one major advantage as would continuous lighting for setting up the shot.

A disadvantage would probably their output being not that great.

Any thoughts or recommendations??

DaireQuinlan

The cheap ones (from what I've read at least, never tried them) suffer from spikes or dips in their spectra. It's expressed as CRI or colour rendering index, expensive panels have a CRI of 90+, cheap ones much lower. So for example it might have a dip in the green part of the spectrum, which will result in magenta colour casts in the shot. OTOH this is probably fixable to some degree in post I guess, and it's not as though people haven't been shooting for years under flourescent and tungsten and still getting good results.

eoglyn

Well that does explain why the small number of people i've seen using them shoot a lot of b&w.

almorris

I tried one off a Sony video camera. The output was so low for photography that I had to push the ISO way up. Went back to bouncing the flash.