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 heat, they don’t require a dimmer, and they can produce multiple colors without gel changes. 

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 you can get deep, saturated colors. Here is a look in another color. I didn’t

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 console evaluations have been on hold for the holidays, but I plan to get back to it

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