GE Reveal Bulbs; Russ was right about these...

cucamongacoin

They work great and are inexpensive! A world of difference from plain incandescent.

notwilight

so what do you set your white balance to, incadescent? A bulb makes a difference if it works well with your camera's interpretation of white balance. BTW, I have a bunch of these I no longer use because they don't seem to make a difference with custom white balance. I use the low wattage flourescent replacements now. --Jerry

--Jerry

Russ

I'm sure that how well they work varies from camera to camera, but for my ancient 950 they do the job. In answer to Jerry's question for most coins I set the white balance measuring against a white piece of paper.

Russ, NCNE

holeinone1972

I can use my camera on custom white balance and measure it, or I can set my camera to incandescent.

They both seem to come out very well.

ricko

Not much to 'white balance' on that SBA.... A quick dip could solve that.... Cheers, RickO

Prethen

In the world of digital photography, is it safe to assume we don't have to stock up on these ancient incandescent bulbs, but rather just adjust the WB on the camera?

I have a new Canon XTI and I will soon get a macro lens. I'm concerned about what type of bulbs I'll need, especially with the compact flourescents making their way mainstream. Also, I'm curious as to what I'll learn to use in this year's Digital Photography session during the first week at the ANA Summer Seminar.

mgoodm3

lightbulbs don't matter much as long as you can get a good custom white balance. Not all compact fluorescents are good - stay away from the warm color balance ones, get the daylight ones.

adamlaneus

One reason why GE Reveal light bulbs work well is they have much more blue in them relative to the typical yellowish cast of an incandescent bulb.
But they are inefficient, since the glass used in the envelope filters out much of the yellow light. These bulbs waste more energy in the form of heat than most. I wouldn't convert my house to them for sure!

I have found that standard warm lighting from an incandescent just doesn't through enough blue light on your subject and your camera has to make do with what is there. This is why warm lighting is to be avoided and 'cool' lighting is better, nomatter what the bulb is.

Fluorescent bulbs work well, but tend to mutate the colors in strange ways, and tend to flicker...so high shutter speeds can be tricky. Whereas the spectral output of an incandescent bulb is generally a reliable curve...a fluorescent bulb's light output curve versus color will be a very strange graph with strange peaks based on the phosphors used. It all averages out to a form of white...but the color rendition is different and non linear and not really completely correctable with a white balance settings. Colors can mutate in unusual ways. But since color is relative, your eye tends to adjust to it.

White balance is a mathematical transformation applied to the "RAW" image as it gets converted to a non-RAW image. This is one of the big reasons you want to shoot in raw...your image data is uncorrected for white balance and can be recorrected without losing data. If your camera only outputs "JPG" images, you don't have a choice in the matter.

I'm finding what I really need is a way to do co-axial lighting. This near vertical lighting isn't cutting it for the shots I want to do.

Wish list:
http://www.hirox-usa.com/Co_axial_Lighting.html