Yeah, there's many challenges Tin Can, I know. Before you know it you'll be going through a crash course of electrical engineering instead of making images. 'Luckily' for me electronics has always been a hobby for me so it's trying to find synergies between one hobby and another.
To make matters worse than the list of issues you mentioned there's also the topic of optics. It's not addressed much save for an odd thread here and there on Photrio. With LED you've basically got two choices, as with any other light source: diffuse or (quasi-)point source. They're both challenging if you try to implement them with LED. If you make a diffuse light source and you want any kind of significant light output also for bigger enlargements, there's the issue of heat dissipation. You'll be handling a fairly big box or plate with many high-power LEDs and you'll have to somehow get rid of the 100+ Watts (or in case of my latest contraption 360W) of heat in a way that doesn't interfere too much with...well, anything. Not to mention getting really even light output across your color channels. Going for a point source/condensor setup is even trickier since a single LED is just about a perfect point source...but you never have just a single LED. Try to take the light from an array of dozens or hundreds of point sources and somehow coax them into behaving like a single apparent point source. Sure, it could be done, but you may add optics design and with any bit of luck lens manufacturing to your list of newly acquired hobbies.
I hope to pick up actual printing again in a few months when we have moved and I'm done renovating our new place. Between posing as an electrician, plumber, carpenter, ensuring that there's food on the table and also attempting to keeping my violin practice up a bit, there's just no time to spend on photography at the moment. Not to mention I really want/need to engineer my new darkroom work/safe/evaluation light system...
Bookmarks