Haze damages LCD projectors
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »We recently learned the hard way that the use of haze can lead to reliability problems for some LCD projectors. We have two rather large LCD projectors (don't know the specs offhand) permanently mounted to the ceiling, projecting onto the ...
The price of cheap Chauvet LED fixtures
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »In my previous post about cheap LED fixtures, I didn't mention our Chauvet Q-Wash intelligent moving light LED fixtures. We bought four at a very discounted price to supplement our conventional movers. They weren't bright enough to stand ...
Server move completed and general update
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 Posted in Linux, Software development, Stage Lighting | No Comments »The site is back online after a server move. Actually I can't blame the server move for the downtime, because I went out of town and then had a lot of catching up to do, and as a result I ...
Cheap LED fixtures
Friday, January 11th, 2008 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »Normally, we stay far away from anything marketed to DJ's, but we've been experimenting with cheap LED fixtures as an inexpensive way to put more colors on stage. LED fixtures have a few advantages: they efficiently produce light without much ...
Cool set design: Part II
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »Here's another cool set design. What's interesting about these two pictures is that the set is illuminated using the same lights at two different intensity levels, but the color seems different. That's a neat feature of incandescent lights--at low intensity ...
Cool set design: part 1
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »After a longer-than-expected holiday break, I'm back with a slightly different topic: set design and construction. Someone else designs and builds our sets, but I get to light them, and I'm usually tasked with documenting them. Our lighting ...
ChamSys MagicQ console review::part I
Thursday, December 6th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »I don't know how to pronounce it, but I like it! This review is based on my impressions gathered from a few minutes of hands-on experience at LDI 2007, and the MagicQ PC software that I downloaded from ChamSys. I ...
LDI Report::Part 3::Midrange Lighting Control Consoles
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »My real mission at LDI was to review lighting consoles--management is considering replacing our Hog 1000 in the next year or so. The Hog is serving our needs well, but we've already used up both DMX outputs, and Hog programming ...
LDI Report::Part 2::Cool Products
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »These are a few interesting products that I saw at LDI. I spent most of my time at the show looking at and trying out various lighting control consoles. I didn't have time to prowl around the smaller booths where ...
LDI Report::Part 1::Eye Candy
Sunday, November 18th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »LDI is where lighting designers go to dream. Companies spend big bucks to bring their products and show them off in the most spectacular fashion. Ironically, some of the less-reputable names have some of the largest booths. ...
Lighting design review: Mutemath in Orlando, FL
Friday, November 16th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »I don't go to many concerts. I don't want to spend the money to hear a band play a poor version of their CD. But I heard from several people that Mutemath was a great live act, and it turns ...
Hog Programming: Cuelists vs. Palettes
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »I've always programmed the Hog 1000 lighting console using cue lists. Why? My prior lighting experience involved HogPC, which is essentially the same software running on a standard Windows PC. The HogPC software emulates the hardware of the Hog console ...
Truss warmers
Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »Truss warmers are lights used to illuminate truss. Truss is fun to light because it's semi-reflective and has a neutral color, so it easily reflects whatever color is used to light it. We used a little par light ...
April 22, 2007: The importance of haze
Sunday, May 27th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »If you are not "into" lighting, then you may not have paid any attention to the beams of light that seem to descend from the lighting fixtures towards the stage. There's nothing special about the lights --the beams are ...
Why the people are blurry
Sunday, May 20th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »This is a simple post to explain why the people are usually blurry inmy lighting photographs. As an illustration, I took three photos of a speaker on stage, using different exposure times. An exposure time of 1/40 second produces ...
April 1, 2007 Lighting for solo vocalists
Sunday, May 13th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »This weekend, two songs started with a solo vocalist. I used the front lights to highlight the solos and provide a transition when the rest of the singers and the band joined in. In the following song, the female vocalist at ...
Discovery Lights, 17-18 March 2007
Sunday, March 25th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »Challenges for this week: The set has been the same for over a month, so I had to come up with something to distinguish it from previous weeks. In addition, a couple of weeks ago our four Trackspots were transferred ...
Theme construction in progress
Monday, March 5th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »I'm working on a new and improved theme for the lighting page. It's still a bit rough because I don't have time to finish it today, but I think it looks promising!
Lighting for February 11/12
Saturday, February 17th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »Nothing too exciting this weekend in the lighting department. In a change from last time, two Studiospots were flown from a pipe just in front of the stage. I don't think they're real useful in that position because ...
The beginning of the lighting blog
Saturday, February 17th, 2007 Posted in Stage Lighting | No Comments »I'm of the lighting operators/designers at Discovery Church in Orlando, FL. I've been doing lighting, off and on, since 2002. Unfortunately I didn't get a digital camera until November 2006 so I don't have much of a record of ...
