Shadowstone’s Paul Distefano demonstrates ARRI’s compact LoCaster, with onboard selection of six color temperatures from 2800K to 6500K and continuous dimming.
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All photos by D. W. Leitner

NAB’s show floor last April signaled new directions in LED lighting. I’ll get to them below, but first a few thoughts on the evolution of electric lighting itself.

We complain we live in a time of dizzying change, but the 1880s were equally disorienting. Edison had patented his carbonized filament and Eastman his flexible roll film within a few years of each other. Electric lights, practical photography, motion pictures had arrived all at once it seemed. Modern times at mach speed.

It’s happening again, as digital imaging eclipses photochemical and filaments white-hot from electrical resistance yield to cool, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and LEDs five times as energy efficient. more

Fast T1.4 Leica Summilux-C 21mm prime lens on a Canon EOS 7D modified for PL mount by BandPro Film & Digital.
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All photos by D.W. Leitner

Shrinking in the rearview mirror like a signpost whizzing past at 80 mph, April’s NAB pointed to no less than four approaching upheavals in production technology. You had to have your polarized glasses on backwards at NAB not to see evidence of them everywhere. For those unable or unwilling to attend NAB, I’ll attempt a recap in my next columns.

These four areas of advancement involve not digital compression or recording but first principles of photography and sight itself: the light that falls on a subject, the lens that captures that light, the sensor that registers the image, the binocular experience of spatial depth.

Racing towards mainstream use, for example, LED production lighting is not only cool-running and energy-efficient but durable, lightweight, and compact. Much of it carry-on size in an era of airline luggage-charge gouging.

I’ll devote an entire column to LED lighting, at NAB and beyond, but for now suffice it to say, with the advent of innovative LED fresnels from industry leaders Litepanels and Gekko, LEDs are red hot (so to speak). Hot enough for Chinese manufacturers to festoon their NAB booths with shameless rip-offs of Litepanels 1×1 luminaires… but I’m getting ahead of myself. more

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the black and white prologue of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.

If names like Truffaut, Godard, Fassbinder, Scorsese, or Almodóvar mean anything to you—directors whom the annual New York Film Festival helped introduce and promote—you’ll realize what riches await at Lincoln Center every September for those lucky enough to attend.
Unlike other film festivals, the NYFF doesn’t hawk premieres. Instead, it skims the cream off the best festivals in the world, particularly Berlin and Cannes, and assembles a premium slate of about 30 features, mostly dramas, with a few documentaries thrown in for good measure. Which is why, for me, NYFF selections are essential viewing each year. more