Sweet natural lighting

Shortly after I moved into my current apartment, I took to changing all of the light bulbs within to compact fluorescent bulbs to save energy. After I installed the first CFL bulb, I found two things that disappointed me.

1. The bulbs I got did not initially light up to their full brightness. It took a few minutes before they were fully lit.
2. The color of the light that came forth from these bulbs were yellowish, similar to their incandescent counterparts. I had hoped that, being fluorescent, they would more closely resemble their tube-shaped cousins.

Still, they would save me some money in electricity bills, and I supposedly wouldn't have to replace them nearly as often as the incandescent bulbs, so I stayed with using them.

After using them, I've noticed that my indoor pictures, where I am loath to use the camera flash unless absolutely necessary, are all turning out very yellow. In other words, I am getting atrocious lighting from these bulbs.

Last week, I was finally fed up with it and decided to look for alternatives. Fortunately, I found some online stores that have "natural lighting" or "full spectrum" CFL bulbs. Good news for me, but I wasn't sure if they will truly be "white light" as advertised, so I decided to see if I could find any at the local stores. My search turned out in vain, and I ended up trying some incandescent "Reveal" bulbs by GE, which visually isn't much better, although in photos they show up better than my old CFLs. There seems to be very little difference between them and the regular incandescent bulbs in my photos, however.

So I went ahead and ordered the CFLs from online, which were rated at 50,000 Kelvin for color temperature.

They work well. I now finally have white light, and they light up fully without delay. Now if only the CFL 3-way bulb from them had brighter low settings...


On a side note, I don't know what that white stuff is at the bottom right corner of the standard incandescent pic... it certainly wasn't anything I placed there when I was taking the picture. Spooky.