Q: Studio lights for portraits

Hi,





Quick one: I want to do portraits in a small (very small) studio setup. Usually one person, sometimes a group of up to four, but close together because of the confined space.

I am also on a limited budget. I am thinking of getting the new 2x400w Gemini set from Bowens. The question is: will this be enough? I suspect yes for one person (even full body) but I also suspect it *could* be tight for four people setups.

How will I do when I get these? Most of it will be one person anyway but I do want to know your opinions on this as far as lighting more than one person with this set.

Thanks so much in advance for your help and input and have a great day!


M

Well, it depends on what you want to do exactly with your lighting. With two lights, you'll have a main light and a fill light. However, will you ever want to light the background? Two 400w lights should be enough to simply cover a small group of people especially in a confined space.


Have you looked into alienbees? I've never heard a bad word against them, they're reasonable, and rugged.

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Two Smith-Victor 500W photo floods bounced off umbrellas with a 480EX fill flash. This is a VERY inexpensive set-up.

I purchased an ebay package and am very impressed with it... paid $597 total for two 600W strobes, 2 soft-boxes, stands, and a case. It also came with several trigger cables and an RF trigger. I was leery about the quality but was very impressed after using it on several shoots. here's a pic of the strobe set...


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For this pic, I used both strobes with softboxes, one for primary and one for fill, I used a snooted 430ex for the background 'halo' and asnooted Nikon SB-24 for the hair rim-lighttriggered by cactus RF triggers. Shot with a 30D, 17-55 2.8 @55mm/f4.5. 10' spacing between my subject and background and 10' between subject and camera.


Oh yeah, almost forgot... teenage acne post-processed out using Lightroom 2 [;)]


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As far as power is concerned, these 600W strobes have two digital scales, 1.0-5.0 and in .1 increments. each strobe was ~8' away. Primary was set to1.8 power and the other was set to 1.3. In some test shots,shooting at f2.8,strobe settings of 1.0 and 1.0 (minimum setting) was waaay too much power.So I would think 200-400W strobes in a small studio would be more than enough imho.


Dave

Really amazing what you can do with good lightning!

Hey Madison, please show us some results after you get your setup going and get a good feel for it.


I like pictures of oranges!