Hi, my name is John DeArmond and I’m a flashahaulic. Or lightahaulic. Or something like that because I’m attracted like a moth to things that give off light, especially lots of light.
Recently I decided to solve a problem that has been getting worse with diabetes and age – the ability to resolve fine detail. The eye doc hasn’t been much help but light and lots of it has. Just like with a camera, if you stop down the iris, your depth-of-field deepens. It takes a lot of light to stop down the human eye which has evolved to handle bright daylight. So I decided to create bright daylight in my shop using BACFLs (big-assed Compact Fluorescent Lamps)
A marvelous thing happened. I can now see!!!
I need to mention BuyLighting [2]. They’re my go-to source for oddball stuff such as these BACFLs. I recently placed an order for the lamps for this project. One came in damaged. A crack in the glass let the air in. Its filaments flared for a moment and then poof! No light.
I dropped customer service a note about the problem. The nice lady on the other end promptly sent me a replacement and didn’t ask for the old one back. THAT is customer service. Keeping the old lamp is going to let me do a future article dissecting one of these large lamps to show how it works.
Enjoy
John