Black light, incandescent light: shadowbox question.

I seem to remember that black light is cancelled by incandescent light. It depends on how bright the incandescent light is. In other words black light works best in completely dark rooms.

I've built a few Trek kits with the same idea in mind for photography ( no opportunities yet ti get the pix, though ). Use a fluorescent tube-type blacklight to bring out the glow you want. The bulb-type blacklights won't work well at all.

From there, use only the slightest bit of incandescent lighting for the rest of the shadowbox to keep theglow of the fluorescent colors from being washed out. you may have to resort to small Christmas lights.

Good luck!

Kugai's got it.

We used to have an exibit on display here at the local planetarium which used several kit-bashed starship models we had built and photographed for our production of a show called "Star Pioners".

For the display, we used two of those "black light" tubes on either side of the viewing window (baffled so the tubes wouldn't be seen when looking into the diorama of course) and then two very dimly lit incandecents which were on a dimmer switch. They were just faint enough to show the surface detail and the black light tubes were on full intensity. The whole display was roughly 5' wide, 4' tall and maybe 3-4' deep - pretty large.

The effect was pretty cool though.

Bri~

Might I suggest UV LEDs for the black light and white LEDs, channelled via optical fibres instead of the incandescent?

How does a UV LED look in comparison to the classic light? I'm sure the LED wouldn't have as much light output, right? Do colors glow with an UV LED like they do the traditional light?

Thanks for the replies everyone. I'll probably be starting this project in mid-summer and I'll try to post info and photos as I go along.

Dave