Recently, Jonathan Miller of Hive Lighting stopped by our showroom to demonstrate a prototype of his new Hornet light. Hive lights employ plasma to produce a very bright and efficient light source.

In 1975, Stanley Kubrick famously lit scenes in Barry Lyndon only by candlelight. To do it, he had to use triple-wicked candles for a bright flame, push the only filmstock at the time to 250 ISO and acquire a super-fast T0.7 Zeiss designed for NASA (he had an old Mitchell camera chopped up just to work with this lens). This allowed Kubrick to shoot under a keylight of just three footcandles.

We've done a lot of testing with the Sony PMW-F3 camera and had great results. Our tests included sensitivity, dynamic range and low light performance. In a three part series, Mitch and I will cover all of these topics with the hopes of shedding light on what this camera can do.