Once when I was a kid, my mom dropped and broke a thermometer. I remember the two of us chasing a wiggly little ball of mercury around the carpet with a piece of cardboard. She didn’t let me touch it, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t turn on fans or open windows or throw away the clothes we were wearing or triple bag, seal with tape, and dispose of all cleanup materials. But then it was the 70′s; we also never wore seat belts, so what did we know?
I only bring this up because with a ban on the incandescent light bulb beginning this year, mercury is often cited as the main reason for criticism of the new CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lamp) design. While meddlesome government regulation and dire warnings about breakage do cause me some concern, I must admit my real issue with the ban is much more selfish than that; it’s about color temperature.
It’s bad enough that CFL’s contain mercury, are weirdly misshapen, aren’t dimmable, create RF interference, spew ultraviolet light, can’t handle voltage spikes, and make us look like shit in the bathroom mirror, but what will we photographers do without that warm tungsten filament glow? I prefer to keep my daylight outside and my warm tungsten in, thank you very much. In fact, I really love it when both warm and cool light sources are successfully combined in the same image. This shot taken at the bar in Kuba Kuba is a good example. I used tungsten balanced film to capture a clean, true-to-life image of the subject under indoor lighting, while the daylight filtering in behind was rendered a dramatic blue.
Sure lighting technology has advanced in leaps and bounds and between CFL’s, LED’s, halogens, and whatever else is out there, consumers will probably have no problem finding warm, pleasant lighting for living rooms and hallways, offices, bathrooms, ovens, car interiors even, but sometimes I’ve just gotta bitch.
Sometimes change is annoying. Sometimes it’s not for the better.
If it aint’ broke don’t fix it…
and it aint’.
Now if we could only decide on ‘color’ or ‘colour’.
Here are a few photos where I used the “wrong” color temperature for dramatic effect.
Kieran Wagner