Add a Soft Panel LED Light for Your Studio and On-Location Work
I love soft panel LED lights, they’re some of the most versatile studio lights for photography and videography.
As photography lights, it’s hard to beat a good LED panel light. Not only are they dual duty since they can be used as studio lights for photography and for a video production, but the best soft panel LED lights are also adjustable, oftentimes continuously variable, with regards to both power levels and color temps.
Benefits of LED Lights for Photography
Besides those benefits of LED lights for photography already mentioned above, some other features that make them so wonderful are that they are generally smaller and lighter than other lighting counterparts and they run so much cooler.
If you’ve ever tried using continuous light quartz lamps or incandescent photo floods, you know how quickly these lamps can heat up. And wow are they hot! Hot enough to make human subjects uncomfortable and virtually unusable for pets or newborn photography.
LED lamps are so much cooler in operation, plus they are also more efficient. Being efficient means that many of them can even run off of batteries, making them a great choice for in the field lighting. Usually these will make use of Sony camcorder style lithium-ion batteries, offering usage times varying from 30 to 90 minutes.
Ikan Corp Video Accessories
When shopping for or recommending professional or other serious use video accessories, I like to look at Ikan Corp first for a couple of reasons.
The company is run and staffed by professional photographers and videographers, so all of the items they sell have already been vetted by serious users. In fact, many of the items were either designed or made by Ikan themselves or found from other makers for very specific uses and needs.
Another benefit of this business model is that we, the consumer, will be able to find extremely high quality accessories at very reasonable prices. In fact, many items may be up to about half the price of comparable items from other brands.
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Lyra LCX21 Soft Panel LED Light with DMX
An excellent example of all that is the soft panel LED light from Lyra, the LCX21. It’s a soft panel light with a beam angle of 110 degrees and is variable in both power and color temperature. Plus it’s able to be used within a DMX studio system.
DMX is a useful way to control lighting and lighting effects with everything balanced and controlled from a central control panel or program.
The Lyra LCX21 has a CRI of 97, meaning that the color and quality of light is extremely high. This also helps in repeatability from session to session, since a higher CRI tends to stay consistent during the lifetime of the lighting fixture.
Color temperature variation is from an extremely warm 2800K all the way up to a very cool 10,000K. So you can blend this light into any ambient light situation or use this variability to create a specific look or feel for your still images or video productions.
Being a professional use model, the Lyra LCX21 is larger, heavier, and more expensive than lights designed for casual use. But being an LED panel from Ikan, the size, weight, and price is still very reasonable considering how powerful and rugged this lamp is.
You are sure to find many uses for this soft panel LED light in your studio for either still photography or videography and it will also liven up any in the field on location photo or video shoots of yours.
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