Incoming – Zebralight SC600

Having been accused of ‘doing people a service by writing the garbage you did and putting it on the net..’ by a keyboard warrior who didn’t leave his own name on comments to THIS POST I thought I would take the recommendation and splash for a Zebralight SC600 Mk II 18650 XM-L.

This is the slightly older 900 lumen version and not the 1020 lumen SC600w Mk II L2 18650 XM-L2 that was recently released.

I also had a good look round on CandlePowerForums and pulled the trigger on an XTAR VP1 Li-ion Battery Charger from LED Fire Torches

Only arrived today but will be going out on the next underground trip probably for some test shots…

Eye Eye Captain…

Been trying to find the perfect lighting rig for the GoPro Hero2 for months and never found anything I was happy with so this was a visit to a short but sweet local culvert to try something else out…

4 x 64 LED lights on a handheld frame running at a supposed 5500K (doesn’t look like 5500K if you ask me) and the GoPro was mounted on the Chesty harness.

This is a lot of light in a small space but the Hero2 still struggles to keep up so its reached the end of the line, he’s going on FleaBay very soon and I’ll drop some shekels on a Hero3 Black Edition 🙂

There’s a handful of stills at the bottom shot on the Canon on the way back through, check the pesky flies that quite artistically fooked the long exposure shots up :-p

Flies ignore long exposures…

Quark, Strangeness And Charm

As mentioned on this blog previously I am a self confessed ‘flashlight whore’. I’ve not done an audit for a long time and I don’t really care to either as I may even shock myself, lets just say I most likely own too many flashlights…

Doing lots of underground shots presents its own lighting problems, one of which is colour temperature. These new fangled LED’s although wonderfully bright seem to produce a very blue beam which tends to make the pictures suck. This issue gets further compounded when I use two or more different lights to paint a shot as you end up with differing ‘blueness’. Of course this all gets fixed later in post as I have to even up the Colour Temperature but what if you could get a flashlight with a ‘neutral’ temperature…?

The theory was to try something from the wonderful people at 4Sevens as they are a company started and run by a self confessed Flashaholic called David Chow who produced a Limited Edition run of Cool, Warm and Neutral temperature lights. Most of these are now discontinued but luckily I managed to pick up a 4Sevens Quark RGB Neutral White from Led Fire Torches.

The 4Sevens Quark RGB Neutral White also has another neat feature (the clue is in the name!!) and that’s a quad die emitter so it has a different colour in each corner (white, red, green, and blue) so I get to kill two birds with one stone:

A) Have a nice neutral light to paint with underground.
B) Try some Troy Paiva type stuff using the coloured die.

Quark RGB Neutral White specs:

Length: 4.8 in
Diameter: 0.86 in
Weight: 1.8 oz (without batteries)
Finish: Type-III hard-anodized aircraft-grade aluminum
Batteries: 2 CR123A

(All lumen outputs are COOL WHITE, Out-the-front)

    * Moonlight: 0.4 lm, 650 hours, 1 ma
    * Low: 2.8 lm, 130 hours, 10 ma
    * Med: 15.0 lm, 25 hours, 50 ma
    * High: 58.4 lm, 7.5 hours, 250 ma
    * Turbo: 150 lm, 2 hours, 700 ma
    * SOS: 22.5 hours
    * Strobe: 4 hours
    * Beacon: 20 hours

From 4Sevens:

The Quark RGB features a CREE MCE-RGB emitter. The MCE-RGB is a quad-die emitter that features a different color for each corner of the die: white, red, green, and blue!

The Quark RGB UI is unique. When the head is tightened, it is always white (or neutral white depending on your model). When the head is loosened, it is one of the RGB colors. Cycling between loose and tight will toggle through the three colors.

The way to change modes is similar to the regular Quarks. Just tap the tail button to change modes (or just turn it on and off within 3-4 seconds). It will toggle between eight modes: moonlight -> low -> medium -> high -> max -> S.O.S -> strobe -> beacon.

Additionally, it will remember the last mode used even after you turn off the flashlight. It will also remember which mode you used in both the tightened and loosened state as well as which color was used in the loosened mode.

As soon as I get the chance I will be out testing this new toy 🙂

Mines #35

Plan A was wet and we really needed a boat, nobody had the balls to see how deep it was so I waded on in anyway just to find out. It was thigh deep, cold and I wasn’t wearing waders, seeing as I was now wet I pushed on for a while to see if things dried up….they didn’t.

We aborted and switched locations to Roof Fall City and I tried out a new toy recommended to me by a well known drainer (thanks for the tip in the unlikely event you are reading this…), a portable LED array that uses 64 LED’s on full power or 36 LED’s on reduced power, it has a ‘daylight’ colour temperature of 5,500K and outputs 480 lumens. I got it wrong really and placed it too near the shots so the backlit shots are a bit overcooked, next time I’ll try diffusing it or placing it further away…

Usual rules apply…No names, no locations, just pictures of somewhere. Don’t ask for locations because I won’t tell you, just enjoy the shots.

 
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 Big Grips

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Big Guns – New Toys…

We went somewhere very BIG recently so I fancied taking some serious ‘firepower’ with me for light painting and general all roundnosiness, we were bristling with a variety of stuff anyway like variousLenser’s,Petzls,SureFires, Underwater Kinetics andSpeleoTechnics but I was still hankering for something silly, off the scale and OTT so I splashed for aThrunite CatapultV2…The Thrunite CatapultV2 is a revised version of the existing Catapult but with a redesigned driver. It’s a genuine 1000 out the front lumens on high due to the totally insane Luminus SST-50 LED.

You can run a variety of different batteries (CR123, 18650 or 17670) as it comes with two battery tubes.Its designed for Search & Rescue so as a result it falls into the ‘Long Range Thrower’ category so take care if you want to use this for close up light painting cos it kicks ass and has quite a tight beam!!!Physically it seems bomb proof and it has IPX-8 Water & Dust Resistance, I certainly dropped it many times during the day and didn’t notice any ill effects.

This is a SERIOUS flashlight but is not cheap…