De Sisti Lighting continuous ceramic discharge metal halide.

De Sisti Lighting is a leading Italian manufacturer of lighting for film, video, and digital studios. My first experience with De Sisti lights is from working at the Malta Centre for Restoration, at the University of Malta. Since they are south of Sicily they obtain most of their camera equipment from Italy.

Each brand of continuous ceramic discharge (CD) metal (CDM) halide lighting has slightly different features relative to hot-spots, beam, spread, and so on. We recommend that you check with a specialist in CD lighting who works with tri-linear scanning backs.

David Christensen knows studio lighting inside out because he designs and builds his own lights: tungsten, fluorescent, and continuous ceramic discharge lighting too. You can contact him at 650 366-5483 or david@NorthLightProducts.com

An innovative Digital Photography Course helps you understand lighting for digital studios

Each kind of digital camera technology may require a different kind of lighting.

A tri-linear scan back from PhaseOne, Kigamo, Anagramm, BetterLight, for example, can only work with certain kinds of lighting. Yet there is not even a single name for the technology: it is called HID, HIQ, CD, or CDM, depending on whom you read. The technology is continuous ceramic discharge metal halide lighting, a lower cost relative of movie set lighting, HMI (Hydragyrum Medium Arc-length Iodide). HID stands for high intensity discharge.

But which kinds are good, and which kinds don’t function with scan backs at all?

Then you have medium format digital backs such as PhaseOne, Imacon, Leaf Valeo, Jenoptik EyeLike, MegaVision and others. These are a different kind of digital camera again. They react differently to lighting than scanning backs.

What about your Nikon, Canon, Olumpus or Fuji digital camera?

To sort all this out the FLAAR editor has attended Photokina four times (took eight years since Photokina is held only every two years). Presently Nicholas is back from PhotoPlus Expo in New York. He spent six days studying digital camera equipment in Cologne at Photokina 2004 last month.

But you can learn his eight-years worth of experience in a single course. Nicholas Hellmuth’s course on digital photography is available via the Internet in your home or office.

Most recently updated November 8, 2004.