Lighting with Lowel Ego

Ego Lighting With Gary Regester

Gary Regester is the original designer of the Lowel Ego, in addition to having been instrumental to bringing collapsible soft box accessories and tabletop light tents to the photo world. The following entries are taken from his blog, Lighting with the Lowel Ego. They show the range of settings that Ego can light effectively, as well as giving technical information on working with fluorescent.

Quick Links: Simple Tabletop / Video & Portrait Lighting / Ego with Gary Regester

Ego as Webcam Light

Tired of looking twenty years older than Noah while spouting the wisdom of the ages? Yes, it is true that video cameras are now so sensitive you can light your face from the monitor. That's cool, really cool! as the monitors have a native white point that is somewhere in the very blue 7000 or 9000 degrees Kelvin. And your light source is ghoulishly coming from below your camera position.

Better to compliment yourself and your viewers with a 5000K high color (92 CRI) wide spectrum beauty light - the Lowel Ego was designed to make products photograph even better than life and you are your best product, so....follows.. and it's much cheaper than surgery.

Ego Lighting Artwork

Any flat art larger than a scanbed is a problem to digitize for the web or print. But with a good digital camera and the four Ego's with two tripods shown here, you could reproduce any flat art and painting up to four by six feet - goal is to cross light at 30 degrees off center from the four corners of the art work - so you are limited only by the height of your tripods or lightstands.

Could also be used a painter's daylight high color tasklight as they create the art.

Key & Fill Style Portrait Lighting

For this shoot, we are lighting our two young models with two EGOs. "KEY/FILL" is the classic formula of portrait photographers (but there is no One Way! - Amen). The idea is that the "KEY" light (the light farthest to the left and closest to our subject in our set up photo) creates roundness and depth, aka 3D, in the subject, while the fill EGO, back at the camera, opens up the shadows and flattens the overall image.

So, two opposing ideas! - one light creates contrast or 3D and one light creates flatness or 2D - so that the two have to be balanced in order to result in a smooth successful portrait. Easiest way to increase and decrease the light intensity is to move the lights towards or away from the subject. Remember your physics class, Lambert's Inverse Square Law states that you double the distances, the radiant body is one quarter the strength (or something like that). So closer, our KEY, the brighter. The farther, our "FILL", the dimmer - and the "falloff" is amazingly quick. Another way to reduce the brightness of the "FILL" EGO is to loosen (aka turn OFF) one of the two lamps. Note again the light foreground and reflector card to further reduce contrast and open the shadows.

Ego on a Boom

Equipment used:
    EGO light
    Lowel Uni Sr Stand
    Lowel Full Pole
    Lowel Lobo clamp
    Lowel Weight
    Lowel Tota-tilter

The Tota-tilter attaches to the bottom of the EGO, screwing into its 1/4-20 screw thread. Then the hinge of the tilter allows the light to hang down when placed on the stand fitting of the Pole, which has been Lobo clamped to the top of the stand in a boom configuration. The Weight is placed on the back end of the Pole for counterweight. Loosen the Lobo clamp slightly & slide the Pole to find a point where the weight is balanced. Do this carefully to prevent the light from falling forward, or backward. Always keep the boom pole centered over one of the stand legs. The stand can be adjusted to place the EGO at the desired height.

page back 1 2 3