The LED Flashlight experiment.

Shooting gigs at small dingy venues is my greatest challenge every single time and to make things worst manually focusing a 50mm F1.8 is a bitch so that is why I did an experiment with a cheap LED flashlight along with my battered Sunpak PZ42X.


The premise: Lighting condition is fucked as hell. 


How to simulate it: I turned off all the lights at 7pm used my Sunpak flash and covered it with a blue cellophane then set it at 1/64th power to act as the ambient light.


The Materials: Cellophane covered LED flashlight with 12 bulbs, some tape, flash mount and a light stand


The Camera Setting: F1.8 @ 50mm, ISO800 @ 1/50th of a second.

I gelled the LED flashlight green because green is cool and to somewhat disguise
the light to theoretically merge it with the ambient light.

The output. I apologize for shooting in front of the
mirror since I don't have a model.

Observations & Conclusions: Since the LED flashlight has only 12 bulbs it only means that the light isn't that strong enough and so what I did is I had it moved it closer to me. Now considering the same factors but instead of a 12 bulb LED flashlight I have the 100+ LED Light  with variable intensities so, theoretically that only means that I don't need to worry about the reach and intensity of the light.


So far I am convinced that shooting gigs in poorly lit venues with the aid of LED lights can help but people may find it distracting so I'll probably do a shoot with a video LED light soon and see the people's reactions.