B & M Lights

18th January 2004

B & M lights ... Anyone ever use em? Like em? Hate em?

Nathan Milford

Love the 2K Openface mini sky pan

Steven Gladstone
Cinematographer
Gladstone Films
Brooklyn, N.Y. U.S.A.
East Coast List administrator - Cinematography Mailing list

The slimline with its doors off is a great thing to stick in a chimera kit...lots of bang for the buck and practically fits in the lid of a
travelling kit.

Weingartner
LA based

Mark H. Weingartner writes :

>The slimline with its doors off is a great thing to stick in a chimera kit...

That's a great idea. Is there a speed ring for it?

Steven Gladstone
Cinematographer
Gladstone Films
Brooklyn, N.Y. U.S.A.
East Coast List administrator - Cinematography Mailing list

>That's a great idea. Is there a speed ring for it?

I don't know - (and this is going back many many years - I am on the other side of the country from the toys I did this to).

I bought a speedring for our 1.2k HMIs and then took a speedlight and literally bent the barndoors into clasps which locked onto the speedring. I then put a mafer on the speedring whenever I used the chimera with the slimline.

I am sure that a speedlight is either available or could be modified with little effort - but the slimline tilt quadrant probably would not hold up a med or large quartz bank, so I would put a pin on the ring and use a grip stand.

Note that the extremely wide flat field of the slimline lends itself really well to filling a shallower video or quartz bank - no need to go for the deeper daylight banks

Mark Weingartner
LA based

>but the slimline tilt quadrant probably would not hold up a med or large >quartz bank, so I would put a pin on the ring and use a grip stand.

I used to encounter similar problems with the 2K Mighty with a Chimera as well as the MR 750 with a foco-spot. My low tech solution was to clamp a pair of vice grips onto the tilt lock and crank down on it to tighten. This usually gave me the leverage for it to hold. Some sets ended up with a lot of vice grips clamped to the lights as we left them on to make fine adjustments during the shoot. Always had to remember to remove them at the wrap.

Jim Sofranko
NY/DP

>My low tech solution was to clamp a pair of vice grips onto the tilt lock >and crank down on it to tighten.

I cracked a brand new Matthews grip head just this way. After a certain point, using a tool as a lever to tighten something just leads to metal fatigue as you are pushing the gear past its limits.

Mitch Gross
NYC DP

>I cracked a brand new Matthews grip head just this way. After a certain >point, using a tool as a lever to tighten something just leads to metal >fatigue as you are pushing the gear past its limits.

Yes, one must be delicate in using the vice grip method but it works well in a pinch.

I'm surprised a grip head would crack under those conditions as I thought Matthews sold a tool to increase the leverage on the arms. But increasing the overall leverage with the right tool as opposed to applying force with vice grips at a specific point on the metal probably makes all difference world. Maybe that's why the vice grip method works on smaller lockdowns like the MR 750 because it spreads the force over a greater relative area
of the lockdown. Just a thought...

Best Regards,

Jim Sofranko
NY/DP