OMG, guys.
I'm working on instructions for how to best light the sculptures. In order to do that, I have to be able to recommend a light bulb. Right? In the digital age, with access to Every Single Thing at our fingertips, how hard is it to find a light bulb?
It's hard, guys.
It isn't any old light bulb. It's special. Super special. This light-bulb struggle has history. I used to use a halogen Solux 4700k 12v 50w mr16 10 or 17 degree bulb. They're expensive (think $25 each, though they did get down to around $10 or $15 each, eventually) and oh-so-incredibly fragile. The fixtures they need are also expensive and, again, fragile, and when they suddenly stop working, you never know if it's the bulb or the fixture, so it was always sort of a struggle. Then they just stopped making the expensive fragile bulbs.
Then the lighting industry started changing their language....
Fine. We adjusted. I found an LED track-lighting fixture (1000 lm, where lm is "lumens," which, fyi, is brightness) with a directed, single-light source, at a major hardware store (It's Lowes) that works perfectly. Tight, clean shadows, nice bright focused light. Great!! I use it in my studio, it's my go-to fixture.... I actually use this fixture to create the work. Which is super, except that they don't sell them online, and no one wants track lighting anymore. So I think, "ok, no biggie, I WILL JUST GO ONLINE AND FIND A LIGHT BULB."
Sigh, so I begin a new phase of my light-bulb quest... I'm asking for a single source (only one diode because we want a single shadow), LED, 1000 lm bulb or fixture available online....
I contact all the big internet light-bulb sites. I even contacted some of the manufacturers of some of the bulbs that I thought might work and the manufacturers of the aforementioned track-lighting fixture to inquire if they sell them online elsewhere.
What do I find out?
I find out that there is no such thing as the fixture in the picture above. It doesn't exist, and how dare I even ask!? You cannot get that much light from a single source, and even if they have the bulb that I need, they will not sell it to me and they don't know where else I can buy it....
To Be Continued....