ABSTRACT
Lighting instruments fall into a few basic categories: open faced, lensed, fluorescents, hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide (HMI), arc lights, plasma lights, soft lights, light emitting diodes, and specialty instruments. The most basic lighting instruments are the open-faced units, some variation of a simple bulb and reflector. Lowel makes a wide variety of very good open-faced instruments. Cinematographer Ross Lowell began experimenting with small, simple lights for location photography. Lensed instruments have a beam that is focused by a glass lens rather than just by a reflector. The fresnel lens is named in honor of its inventor, French physicist Augustin Jean Fresnel. Fluorescent instruments have been hugely popular over the last 20 years, due to their low power consumption and soft light. HMI lights are a member of a class of lights known as high-intensity discharge. An exciting development recently has been the refinement of plasma source instruments.
