Thinking Of A Different Temperature

No, I don't mean just waiting for summer to roll around. It'll roll around of its own accord without us wishing for it. Then we'll wish for winter...

What I mean is the business of lighting one way, seeing another, and ending up with a third option. And how to cope with it all.

I use studio flash units made by Elinchrom. They are fine items and have served well over several decades. Were i re-equipping the studio with someone else's money I might wish for Profoto, but as I have 5 lights already and a cupboard full of light shapers, I will stick to the Elinchroms.

They all have modelling lights to allow me to see what the pattern of light coming out of the front will be. That is all I can really tell with a modest degree of accuracy, though - the pattern - because the modelling light is a tungsten light bulb that is in aslightly different position from the flash tube.

What comes out with the modelling lamp is yellow light - it is quite different from the clear 5000º Kelvin output when the flash tube goes off. If I am looking at the setup in the studio my eyes and the LCD screen on the Fujifilm X-E2 see that yellow light and imagine that is what will go with the final exposure. Nope. Fortunately there is instant replay to let me see what happened, but there has to be a mental off-set to think of what the result might be.

A suggestion has been made that there might be an improvement if you put an LED lightbulb in place of the modelling lamp. Try it and tell me - my Elinchroms are 250EL and 500EL models.

I should not complain - I used to use sheet film and had to do a Polaroid sheet film test beforehand. Then I had to meter for two different ISO's and apply all the rest of the imaginary offsets as well. Each finished negative was a surprise and each finished print a version of reality that could never be repeated...