Flexible Lighting On The Go – The Scorpion Light

Lighting is a key component of making a professional looking video regardless of purpose, whether it’s a music video, corporate job, documentary or a short film. Quite often many filmmakers give too much consideration on the camera side of things – what camera to use, and much less attention to the lighting kit that would be required to make the camera images shine. Without proper lighting even the most “top of the line” camera can produce average results.

With dwindling production budgets, and shrinking crews, for cameraman trying to get an adequate, reasonably priced & portable lighting kit, the job has become even harder.

That’s why the guys at Blind Spot gave us the Scorpion Light.

Scorpion Light 4k shooters

The Scorpion Light is about portability, ease of use, flexibility and affordability. Taking lighting to the limits of your imagination.

The Scorpion Light is compact light, which uses a high-performance single-die white LED diode for maximum flexibility for handheld, location, documentary and/or studio camera work. The Scorpion light can be used in a variety of applications – as a key, or back light, fill or background light.

Due to its compact size and flexibility, the Scorpion Light can be mounted in a position to offset the lens as to avoid frontal flat lighting, you’d get normally from on-camera LED lights and provide a more dramatic and pleasing side lighting. Thus making it also ideal for Steadicam/Handheld 3-axis gimbal stabiliser shots, dolly and crane shots where a lightweight fill light is sometimes required.

The project was started by Billy Campbell, a freelance cameraman who’s worked for the likes of BBC, BBC3 and Channel 4, where he had a chance to experience some of the best lighting equipment on the market. The idea for the Scorpion Light was born out of the necessity for low-cost lighting systems that meet the quality standards of today’s professional filmmaker, which at the moment on the market there are none.

The complexity and expensive cost associate with high-end professional-quality lighting rigs was also a major reason why Billy and his team of engineers started working on an affordable lighting solution for the cameraman on the go.

Here’s an example of how you can rig your 4 x Scorpion lights for a interview setup:

Using the Scorpion Lights for an Interview Set-up from Blind Spot on Vimeo.

After successfully funding a Kickstarter campaign earlier in the year, the guys at Blind Spot are getting ready to ship the Scorpion Light Sets to Kickstarter campaign backers in the coming weeks in October.

The Scorpion Light Specs:

  • Goose neck length: 350mm
  • Mounting options: 16mm spigot, ¼” or 3/8” thread adapter, hot shoe adapter, suction mount
  • Emitter (bulb) Power: 13W
  • Dimmable 10%-100%
  • Power sources: AC power, Sony NP-F series batteries, D Tap
  • Power requirement (mains supply): 120-240VAC
  • Battery run time: 1h (NP-F550), 3.3h (NP-F960)
  • Optics Colour Temperature: Daylight (5700K) or Tungsten (3000K)
  • Output: 1100lm (daylight) 700lm (tungsten)
  • Emitter Running hours : 50,000 hours
  • Gel attachment method: Magnets on barn-doors

I’ve shot a few music video in which we had shots of a moving car and the artist inside the car, so we had to light it somehow. We ended up resorting to rigging some in-car LED’s but we could have done better had we had a Scorpion light with a suction cup for example as in this video.

The Scorpion Light Kit is currently priced at £895 + VAT and it comes with 4 lights, 4 clamps, 4 Sony NP-F style batteries, filters, power leads, D-tap adapters, cold-shoes all packed in a Peli-style portable case. For more information and how to purchase your Scorpion light head over to Blind Spot.

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