Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Back when Mary and I were getting started and were looking at various kinds of lighting equipment, a wise photographer once advised me, “Light… is light.”
The most important characteristics that any studio lighting system can have are the quality and quantity of its output. The kind of hardware that you use can have an impact on both of these aspects but the quality of the light can further be affected by your choice of light modifiers, such as umbrellas and softboxes.
Continuous lighting is always “on,” much like turning on a light bulb or shooting outdoors using the sun, enabling you to use your in-camera light meter to measure the light falling on your subject. Continuous lighting equipment lets you see how the light falls on your subject and because some of this kind of gear gear can be inexpensive—even using LED light bulbs—it makes a good starting point for anyone on a budget. Continuous sources sometimes use quartz or photoflood bulbs that can be hot, even dangerously so, leading to the use of the term “hot lights” to describe them. An increasing number of continuous lighting tools are being made with fluorescent and LED lights producing what are, in effect, cool “hot lights.”
Electronic flash may be more familiar to most of you because almost every DSLR or mirrorless camera has one built-in. Because the light from electronic flash is almost instantaneous you can’t directly see the effect of the light on your subject, which is why most studio electronic flash units have a “modeling” light to show an approximation of what the lighting will look on the final image.
How I made this photograph: Here’s aspiring model Laura May Bachmayer doing her best Holly Golightly turn and being photographed using a Broncolor power pack and head system. The high-key lighting set-up used a Broncolor MobiLED head with 36×48-inch softbox that was placed at camera right, while the second head, at camera right, is aimed at the studio’s (white) wall. The camera used is a Canon EOS 60D with EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (at 50mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/16 and ISO 320.
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My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography with new copies available from Amazon for $33.65, as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price around nine bucks and the Kindle version is $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.