So I've got these two Slimline LED light panels. They're really good. they're but they're 60 wat jobs. they're basically the brightest.

Lights I've got here in the lab and I was thinking the plan was to put them on this wall here. uh, two of them so that it would light up my face when I'm sitting here on the stool. you know how my cameras is mainly here. pretty much when I'm shooting the talking head version of the blog.

I'm sitting here and really, you know I'm not getting much light so there's Shadows cast and all that sort of thing. but these are you know, um 60 W input rated uh light panels. So I was thinking they're probably you know I can't have them super bright on the wall here. Let's wrap this one up in brightness and they to go up to maximum brightness.

These things are blinding and to have two of them in my face I Think it's a bit of a waste. actually. now they are 1200 mm by 300 mm. which means they're actually designed to go in the ceilings.

They're the same size as the tiles and the existing troughs. The standard trough is 1,00 by 300 as well. so they should in theory just slide in. and I think that's why they have like this Ridge around the side there so that they can sit on the metal brackets up there.

So I thought well you know, instead of putting them on the wall panel I thought why not just cut a tile out in the roof, cut half a tile and install them up there? So I will get light coming at least down here like this. So I'll sort of get the infill at an angle in my face like that, but it'll also light up the bench as well. and this whole area. That's the plan.

Give it a go, just take a quick. Light Reading here, it's currently about 150 Lux in the corner here, which isn't much at all. I mean when I installed the new LED lights on the bench here 470 No problems at all, but it really drops. you know, in the center here 300 and then really over here.

you know, 150 in the corner? So I reckon if I at least whack one up there, it should give a whole lot of extra light over this area. I Don't think I'll give up my day job I broke one. What? that'll be the carut that'll be the uh side I cut out so you idea? get a stly knife. Probably they should just cut with a Stanley knife.

hopefully. um, down the center and that will give me a uh 300 mm tile to uh fit in there. h And if you haven't seen up inside one of these uh, office crawl spaces in these commercial buildings, let's have a look. I Don't think the light's terrific up here? Oh actually, it's pretty good.

There we go. Tada, This is what these crawl spaces look like. It's probably I don't know. 3T High Maybe you can see all the huge power wiing there.

the air conditioning Ducks and the uh troughs. of course, the light troughs in there. Well, there's here's one of the outlets. that's one of the aircon outlets over there.

You can see all the way through to the other offices in there, all the phone cabling up the top. Um, that's all there. It is. Telecom.

International Telephone cable5 mm I Think that's a 20 pair cable and uh, as you can see, here's the troughs. These troughs just sit in these uh, metal brackets along here. so they're all. These are a drop ceiling I Believe they call them.

sorry if I'm getting the terminology wrong I'm not in the building trade, but they're basically you know there's a FL There's a floor up the top here, which is metal and they these ceilings are effectively hanging ceilings and they just hang down on these metal brackets. So um, you can't really walk on these I Don't think so. I Don't you know? um, you would? You wouldn't want to go up there and crawl around. That's the Coridor across there.

You can see right over to the other offices, so if you can get into one office, it's actually not hard to, uh, crawl into another one. You just remove the tile and hop over the wall. And if you're wondering what that red cable is there, that's um, the fire alarm sensor wiring. I've got one fire alarm sensor there, and uh, another one over there as well in my little cubicle space and there's quite a mess of wires all over there cuz my office here has uh, eight phone outlets in it.

go figure. So and um, they install of course these PowerPoints for the light. just a regular uh PowerPoint so that when they wire up the build, when they wire up, the building and electrician comes in, licensed electrician wires up all these uh, power points. There you go, you can see them there and then the uh, lower paid uh building builders are allowed to come in who aren't electricians and install all the lighting because there's existing approved PowerPoints there.

and uh, so that's how you can get cheaper building labor to install all your lights and stuff. So now I'm going to put this panel up here and uh, I can plug it in and trial it out before I do anything too permanent cuz once I cut the tiles and stuff, you know you got to be pretty sure of what you're doing. So disconnect the power plug for a minute. Let's try that.

I Think it should just fit? They are. Oh, there's just there. We go There we go. Beautiful that fits perfectly and I should be able to plug that in.

There we go. Tada So that's on low at the moment. Let's uh, ramp that up and that's I think that's pretty close to full. It's pretty cool being able to remote control your Uh lights and I can PR that in by holding down the there we go.

so if I switch it off, it should now come back on at the full Mark Beautiful! So you can program in the intensity that comes on at and that's really quite nice. I Like that. where's my light meter? Now we're talking 250 in the corner and 600. no 490 bit of of a shadow there.

500 600. Wow, that's actually there's a I go like 6 in on my bench and there's a difference between 500 and 600 probably cuz I'm right under one of my new spotlights there. perhaps? Anyway, 700 there so that should be good for a front-on Blog Let's give it a try. All right.

I'm dual wielding remotes now. I Got the remote for the new light up there and got my remote for the camera I can zoom in hey, set to slow Zoom at the moment, but zoom out. So let me set the uh, let me set the fixed exposure so the exposure won't change with the light level. So this is fixed exposure.

this is with the light on and if you can probably see like the shadow over here cuz there's no lights basically on this wall I'm relying on the light bouncing off the white wall and coming back to light up sort of this side I Me you'll notice this side's a lot brighter and uh, let's so this is on Full brightness. Let's switch it off. There we go. Yeah, brighter on is a lot better Is it not? there's This is what I've been shooting with um up until now this get it back to front on the camera this uh, bright side over here and this evens it up a bit more I think and the wall behind me is uh, not as dark either.

There we go I think that is a winner and that should help with the focus stuff as well autofocus and manual focus with the depth of field stuff sometimes I get it slightly out of focus cuz my camera is so good that it can do that. it can get that depth F filled stuff. So now, hopefully I can um increase the um f- stop on the thing permanently and that will give me a deeper depth of field and things will stay in focus better. It's the plan anyway.

so that's really I think that's a good Improvement better than on the wall I think the wall would have been cuz I'd be staring at it I'd be squinting wouldn't be that good at all. So I rather like that I've got an extra panel here and uh I'm deciding if the problem is I'll show you here we go. let's have a look. there's my there's my t-shirts hanging there by the way.

um so I've got the light there at the moment. turn auto exposure off. there we go so compensates for that. So the problem is, this is only like a half panel.

so I'd have to measure that to see if it would fit in there next to it. but if it does I think I could probably take out that tile as well and uh, and put it in there so it would, uh, light up even more I think it's going to be a winner. So let's measure this. I think it's uh, no, no, it's not going to fit.

Bummer. Although, no, it might fit on top and then go over. No, it's not. No, the pillar of course goes all the way up.

Silly me. So the only other option would be this tile here. but uh, the problem with that is, um, that it's a little bit closer to here so it's not going to light up the face as much. but that might be my best option cuz I really need sort of more light on this side here coming down so that could that could help I think I might go for it now that's really some serious light in this corner now.

but you can see possibly on camera you can see it's strobe in, see, it's strobing against the white wall there. so very concerned about that. and uh, there we go. Boom.

But let's get the light meter out. Oh 800 820 Lux that's insane on the bench is now 800 850, 900, 930 a th000 right here. 1,000 luck on the bench. Oh Beauty and here it is.

Look at it. Woohoo! It's lighting up all this side. it's bouncing off the wall beautifully. and if I switch it up, hang on.

fixed. There we go. We've got uh, fixed exposure on the camera and turn off turn off. It's not turning off crap battery.

Hang on he heap of crap there. Whoa. look at that. Anyway, this is if I turn the auto exposure back on the camera will now compensate for the darkness of course cuz this has got a really good low light sensor.

It can go down to, you know, really low amounts of Lux and still gain up the uh light and still look quite reasonable. but you can see that this is really lit up here cuz there's nothing bouncing off this wall. So um, if I switch it on woo overexposure there for a second W my eyes have to adjust. it's a massive amount of light, but uh, there you go.

I like it Now of course one of the issues is I can see strobing on the LCD so I don't know if that's going to show up on camera or not I have to load the video file into the computer and have a look see if it shows up there. but definitely see the strobing lines and aha turns out I didn't have one of them on full brightness and now there's no strobing that I can see on the LCD at all. So I turned them up to Max and of course um, there's no Pwm you put on maximum and it's no longer you know Pwm in those LEDs no pulse width modulation therefore no flicker constantly on beauty. and if we look at the Lux oh we got 1,000 1100 Lux in the corner 1,00 There it is.

Do you believe it? Well yeah at one point yeah, my camera was blocking. look at that. 1,200 Lux under these lights 1400 1,500 on the bench? you know? 900 No. I'm probably Block in yeah ah thousand oh man wo and if I play around with the focus here on you'll see the back of the board.

There is now in focus and the front is out of focus. This is an example of shallow depth of field and the front of the board is in focus and the rear of the board is out of focus. And really, that's undesirable. really.

for this kind of board, it's that's manual. It's going to go back to automatic There, it's just moving back I wasn't actually in manual mode there I was doing manual override with automatic. but uh, let's try and set a fixed F- stop and see what happens. Okay, now that's at an aperture setting of F2.8 and as you can see, the rear end of the board is pretty much um, out of focus.

Now it's in Focus But if I put the front in Focus the rear goes is out of focus. That's because it's a low aperture value. Let me increase that now and see if we can get the depth of field to in include the whole board. and there you go.

that's an aperture value of F4. So now the front and the rear of the board is completely in focus. and if I I can make the rear out slightly out of focus Again by doing some adjusting my manual adjust ring there, but pretty much it's going to auto pretty much back to get that entire board in there. Now that's at F5.2 and as you can see, it's significantly darker.

But because I've got a good low light sensor, of course it is able to handle that with very little noise. But I think we'll still see some noise if we go right up to F8 or thereabouts. and there you go. that's the maximum value of F8 and you can see the noise coming in.

and I've done a video on this uh, previously or was included as a subset in another video and uh, this is much better now because I've got much more light in here. so I can probably leave the camera apparrently set to F4 aperture or thereabouts. So I get a greater depth fulfilled and I don't have to worry about, you know, getting things in and out of focus nearly as much as I normally do. Let's try a little test here: I've got uh, my electronics Australia magazine old one there September 1986 cost $5 50 back in those days and um, it's about uh, 40 50 50 cm away from the camera there and I'm at F4.0 and let's bring a board in here instantly and you'll see that the autofocus is.

you know it's You'll see that behind it as well, trying to focus this and the background there. The background is out of focus now and you'll notice the time it takes to go. From that to that with F4.0 let's try F2.8 and here we are. we're now at F2.8 Let's give it a try.

Bring it in, you'll notice it probably takes a bit longer to lock in on that board and it should be more out of focus the magazine in the background there so we take it away and it should take longer to come back in cuz it's got further to go than if we were at a higher aperture value. That's the theory. Anyway, I think so there have it thanks to Doug at Doug for analog design I Got some really sweet ass lights in here. well over a th000 lux on the bench.

Oh man, that's just it's brilliant no pun intended. Catch you next time. Yeah.