Stage Lighting

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 plan to review a lot of consoles by downloading the offline editors, and hopefully we […]

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 is not the easiest thing to teach to new lighting operators.  So, we’re looking at

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 the most interesting products are sometimes hidden.  These are just the things that caught my

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. High End was completely absent–a source told me that they don’t spend money on trade shows because they

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 with graphical buttons and wheels on the computer monitor, which can be manipulated with the

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 on one end of a section of truss to turn it blue, with a “cap” taped on

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 produced when the light is reflected from millions of tiny drops of haze. Haze is produced

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 a sharp speaker, but an overally ugly picture because of the noise in the image. Look

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 stage left leads the song, so I highlighted her for the first look by