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Claimed to be "the world's flattest softbox," this new lighting concept is part of a system that's probably the most scalable of its kind. Whether you're lighting a single piece of jewelry or an entire jewelry store, the Rololight system can expand or contract to light it. You can link its modular fluorescent tubes to form entire walls of light, or scale back to a small bank of three or four tubes for tabletop jobs. The resulting flat panels of light can be spread across a floor or ceiling, hung on a wall, or mounted on a conventional light stand.
Rololights are usually sold in eight-tube Pro Kits that include the hardware needed to link them to one another, plus two adapters for lightstand mounting. An eight-tube bank measures 25x25 inches and emits enough soft, wrap-around illumination for an exposure of about 1/60 second at f/4.5 (ISO 200) with a light-to-subject distance of about four feet. Tubes are available in 3200K, 5600K, and 6500K color temperatures.
The system's linked sections don't have to be broken down for transport; the panel that holds the tubes is flexible and can simply be rolled up (hence the name) and loaded into appropriately sized carrying cases. Each tube draws only 24 watts for its 100-plus tungsten-equivalent watts of output (about what you'd get from a 500-watt tungsten hot light diffused with a typical softbox), so you can group dozens of Rololights without tripping circuit breakers or blowing fuses. And because the mounting panel that holds the tubes is thin and flexible, it can go places and do things that conventional softboxes can't. You can literally "wrap" light around a subject by bending a Rololight bank to conform to its contours. About $1,650 (Pro Kit). www.rololight.com
American PHOTO Editor's Choice 2007
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