This is my new favorite light to have on hand for any type of shoot!
I saw this light a couple of years ago when it was first advertised and didn’t think much of it other than it looked kind of scary. I have to admit that I sort of thought it was a bit of a gimmick. But a year or so later, I needed to find a lightweight/smaller version of a Briese light that I could fully control via DMX, so I decided to look deeper into this Hudson Spider option. After just a few minutes of looking around and reading about its designer, I was immediately sold.
The light itself is very simple. It’s 8 arms produce an un-diffused parabolic array of LEDs with an output of 12,280 lumens. The throw pattern is very even and consistent over the entire spread of the lamp. When you add to it the Redback Octagonal Parabolic reflector and softbox (at 36″ diameter), you get an even smoother glowing beauty light. Basically, the lamp will give you an even light from edge to edge whether you are looking for hard or soft light. The other attractive features of this unit are: it’s crazy lightweight (about 10 lbs), it’s fully dimmable from 0-100% (no pop-on effect), it’s also fully bi-color tweakable (2600-6300K with a CRI of 95), and it’s fully DMX controllable. Basically, it’s all the tech you love to have at your fingertips – with the bonus of having a very beautiful throw pattern.
The company is also seen other very useful ways to use the head and have designed many accessories for the units, making them even more useful in other situations, e.g. Jemball, Honeycomb snapgrids, Teaser, and even a 6′ Softbox option.
Here is a link to there gallery page Hudson Page
I’ve used this light in both commercial and narrative sets and love its versatility on both.
