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art

Art.

Cool Lamp Monday

Today, a bit of really, really cool art by Dennis Parren. This lamp features cyan, magenta, and yellow LEDs pointed around at slightly different angles and crazy wire shapes. When these three primary colors (more on that later) combine, they create white light. When one of the colors is blocked by the structure of the lamp itself, however, multicolored shadows are created and cast about the room. Observe: CMYK up ‘switch on’ from Dennis Parren on Vimeo. This takes an effect that many lighting companies have spent a lot of time and energy trying to eliminate – the multicolored shadows effect from LED wash lights and exploits in an incredibly clever way. The descriptions of the lamp claim that it… Read More »Cool Lamp Monday

Gel colors I like

Gels and dichroics might seem antiquated to the new kids on the concert lighting scene, what with the abundance of LED sources floating around the stages these days. The fact remains, however, that as wonderful as LED lights are for their electrical efficiency, it remains very difficult to get certain colors from them because of the narrow-bandwidth nature of their output spectrum. This makes them prone to the phenomenon of metameric failure – where two materials that look the same under one light source (tungsten, say) look very different under a different set of lighting conditions. (Say, the sickly white emitted by an RGB-mixed white.) For the sort of design that I’m normally involved in, this isn’t an issue –… Read More »Gel colors I like