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Flashbulbs and Digital Photography

by Bill Storage

photos by Bill Storage & Laura Maish

updated July 20, 2006

Why Flashbulbs?

Even tiny miniature-base flashbulbs emit far more lightthan most electronic flashes. This makes them attractivefor a few special artificial lighting situations. Cavephotographers like their high output and their long burntime, which adds an appealing blur to moving water.They are also useful for places where studio strobes aren'tpractical, such as certain outdoor situations, and wherestrobes would be destroyed, such as in destructive testing.There is also some degree of nostalgia centered aroundHollywood glam shots of the '40s that has resulted in thestrange belief that bulb lighting produces a certain look that cannot be achieved with strobes, e.g. Bill Cress'claim that because bulbs ignite and burn from the centerof the bulb, they produce more intense light in the centerof the image plane (which he curiously dubs a "halo").This is utter baloney. Everyone is entitled to their ownopinion, but not their own physics. The

look

of light is afunction of its size (softness), duration, direction andcolor. The '40s glam look resulted from reflectorcharacteristics and a very low depth of field; and the mythof its resulting from the magic of bulbs stems in part fromthe marketing materials of flashbulb dealers.

Photo 1 - Lechuguilla Cave Passage lit by three M3B flashbulbsmanually triggered; no tripod.

The flashbulb mystique has resulted in the hoarding of some very old screw base bulbs. I bought small quantities of them overthe past 20 years from estate sales; and purchased a few boxes recently on EBay. Over the past year, we (Laura and I) attemptedabout eight photo shoots using large bulbs, and detected what seemed to be a large variation in the light output of batches of thesame type of bulbs. We also found we had a lot of duds that wouldn't fire in a 4.5 volt Graflex gun, in Honeywell 9 volt guns,or in Ron Simmons' custom-built waterproof 22 volt guns (see Photo 6).

Digicams with Flashbulbs - the Dilemma of High/Low Tech

Flashbulbs take a surprisingly long time to ignite and reach maximum brightness. In the old days, cameras had several settingsfor delaying the time between hitting the shutter button - which started the ignition process - and opening the shutter. As bulbtechnology progressed, cameras accommodated the delay for bulb ignition by adding "M" and "FP" synchronization settings,corresponding to delays of roughly 10 and 20 milliseconds. FP (Focal Plane) bulbs were designed to allow high shutter speeds,(above the camera's "sync speed") the faster shutter speed during which the window onto the film plane is completely open (asopposed to a slit between two curtains traveling across the film plane - see Figure 1, FP Sync at 1/250).FP bulbs effectively waste bulb output; much of the bulb's light isstriking the curtain blocking the film plane. Consequently, someFP bulbs have huge total light output, making them attractive forsituations that need a lot of light, such as big rooms in caves.Since flashbulbs have not been in general circulation for severaldecades (one manufacturer, Meggaflash, still exists), modern filmand digital cameras tend not to have M and FP synchronizationsettings. This means that a digital camera must use a shutter speedequal to the sum of the times needed to catch the full burn of theflashbulb plus the ignition delay for that bulb (Figure 1 - Digital1/20). In mixed-lighting scenarios, this increases the likelihood of blur, either from subject motion or camera motion.Most digital cameras are designed to emit, either through a smallon-camera flash or through an attached flash unit, a so-called "pre-flash". This small burst of light that the camera uses to set focallength, aperture, white balance and/or main flash output occursbefore the camera's shutter starts to open. Unless the pre-flash canbe switched off, as it can on many newer digicams, it prevents the

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Photo 2 - Black Chasm lit by three flashbulbs - a No.40B on astand near the camera, an M3B above the man on rope, and anM3B in a Simmons flash held 6 inches under water. Three WeinUltra slaves fired the bulbs simultaneously, initiated by an on-camera electronic flash with black electrical tape over its head.ISO 200, f/11, 1/30 sec.

use of optical slave triggers unless the slave has a correspondingdelay. Several such "digital slaves" have emerged as aconsequence. With many digicams, you can also attach a low-techmanual electronic strobe to trip slave sensors, but beware thatdigicams are reported to tolerate only low hot-shoe voltages, somany flashes cannot be safely used in this manner (see hot shoevoltage links and discussion below).While camera makers do not publish the pre-flash to main flash(pre-flash to open-shutter) interval, experimentation withflashbulbs and our Canon cameras suggests that it iscoincidentally about the same as the FP-synch delay in older filmcameras. Therefore, you can leave the pre-flash on, and reduce theshutter speed by about 20 mSec, and still catch more than 90% of some FP bulbs' output.Unfortunately, our testing showed a wide range in delay values for different FP bulbs. Initially we thought that different models(e.g., No.3 vs. No.31) had greatly different sync delays. Further testing revealed huge variations within different batches from aspecific type and manufacture (here "batches" means groups obtained from different sources with apparent similarity within agroup, not manufacturing batches or lots). Sync delays of most batches of old bulbs that we tested were far greater than thatspecified by their manufacturers - some exceeding one second. Apparently, loss of contained oxygen through the bulb base overthe years leads to slower ignition. More on this below.

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Scenarios for Flashbulb Use

Figure 1 - Sample burn curves for electronic flash (strobe) and several types of flashbulbs, including open-shuttertiming and duration for several sync settings. Black/white rectangles indicate closed and open shutter at 5 mSecintervals. Note partially open shutter when shutter speed exceeds sync speed (e.g. 1/250 FP). Based onmanufacturers' info, our testing, and Popular Photography's

Photo Information Almanac '84.

Caves are no doubt the most common subject of flashbulb photography. Since caves lack common visual clues of space, suchas converging parallel lines and landmarks of known size, backlighting is commonly used to enhance the perception of depth.Backlighting also avoids the fog effect caused by light from a flash reflecting off mist between the camera and subject. Cavers,for whom equipment size and weight is critical, are remarkably adept at shooting backlit shots with multiple bulbs, noelectrical/electronic synchronization and no tripod. Impossible, an outsider might think. But in a dark chamber, bulb-firingcavers have learned to fire their bulbs with amazingly small time intervals after seeing a first flash go off. The photographeropens his shutter (on the B setting), calls "fire", sees a flash, and releases the shutter. The shutter may be open for half a second,but the opportunity for a blurred image exists only in the interval between the first and last flash, provided stray light fromheadlamps is eliminated. The shot of Lechuguilla Cave (photo 1) used this technique with three flashbulbs. The interval wasperhaps 1/10 second. Any camera movement during this time was masked by the fact the intersection of the exposures fromeach of the flashes is relatively small and is in a dark or uninteresting part of the photo.Despite the relative weakness of portable electronic flashes compared toflashbulbs, modern film and digital cameras are sensitive enough to allowuse of electronic flashes for many cave shots. But output isn't a bulb's onlyadvantage however. Cavers benefit from the fact that bulbs emit light inall directions. They can use partial reflectors, vary the distance from thebulb to a reflector, or use no reflector at all to control where the light goes,and to control the transition from light to dark areas of a picture. A few"bare bulb" electronic flashes can do this, but their domes tend to be ratherfragile.Finally, one aspect of bulbs usually seen as a weakness, burn time, oftenturns out to be an advantage for cave photos. When raging torrents areexposed for a few thousands of a second (the duration of an electronicflash), their motion is unnaturally frozen. The 1/30 second burn durationof an M3B bulb gives the appearance of motion, as seen in photo 3, a shotof me on rope in Cueva de Agua Carlota, Mexico, by Jim Smith.Big screw base bulbs are attractive for shots of very large cave chambers.Their output-to-volume ratio is lower than that of small bulbs, but it isoften impractical to fire a large number of small bulbs. For impressivebig-room shots and discussion of technique, see the sites referenced at the

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