Hello everyone, this my first post here. I am a complete newbie in this forum and am looking for your insights on single LEDs. I looked through some previous posts, but did not see any that would address my question. My apologies if I overlooked a thread. If this has been discussed in the past, I would be grateful if you pointed me to that post.
I am an artist working on a live performance projected on the inside of a dome with light and shadow. For this project it is important to have super crisp shadow. To find out if a light is good, we usually do the “arm hair test. If you hold your light source about 15-50 cm away from your arm and you can clearly see the hair on the back of your arms or hands at 10 m away, then the light source will work for our purposes. My best light so far has been a Nu-Flare Rebel 90 LED, 210 lumens, (3rd generation Luxeon Rebel 90 LED). However, it is too weak for the distance we have to cover. The light becomes greyish and does not render colours with gels or dichroics well.
We tried a lot of different light sources. We went through quite a few flash lights (we always remove the optics) and light bulbs. An LED Lenser flashlight was recommended by a friend but this did not give us the crispness we are aiming for.
So, I built my own wired light with a Cree XLamp XP-L-High Density LED star (warm white 3000K). The light quality is excellent. I have not tested it in the dome yet, but just creating shadows on a white wall about 2-5m away from the projection surface shows me, it is not going to work as hoped. It produces an extra shadow like a ghost (not sure what the technical term is) and is a bit too fuzzy. It barely passes the “arm hair test.” The light is fantastic if the object that throws the shadow is close to the projection surface, but that is not our challenge. The challenge is a crisp shadow when the light source and object are close together and the projection surface is far away.
Right now, I am thinking it may be the actual size of the die itself that is causing issues. But I am not sure.
Does anyone here have an idea if there is a powerful light out there, that is similar to the 3rd generation Luxeon Rebel 90 LED, but much stronger?