Studio Lighting; Flash Heads or Continuous Lighting?

It’s day 2 of Tess mumblings, huzzah! Well ok it’s not really that thrilling, but I suppose I’m pretty proud of myself for giving it a go. 

Today I will be talking about my experience of studio lighting, yes – I know it’s a topic often covered, but this is mainly going to be used as a guidance tool for myself, to look back on when I need it.

Studio Lighting; Flash Heads or Continuous Lighting?

Continuous Lighting

Advantages:

·       The main advantage from my experience is that continuous light heads and bulbs are relatively cheap compared to the more expensive flash heads.

·     The continuous flow of light lets you see and control exactly what is going on with the shadows, tones and highlights – I really like this about continuous lighting.

Disadvantages:

·         Whilst I find controlling the amount of light and exactly what it is doing, continuous lighting has a tendency to heat up very quickly, and can cause trouble when using make up!

·         Depending on what Kelvin bulb is used, generally – I find that even daylight bulbs can have a sort of yellow effect on the image. However – a bit of tweaking in an image processing software can sort this out.

These images have been shot in a home studio set up – with three continuous lights connected to reflector umbrellas. The bulbs are daylight bulbs and so far – they haven’t gotten too hot so I’ve avoided the melting make up situation. I’ve found that to really get the most out of them, they need to be quite close to the subject – which is very intrusive. This affects the control of the light as well, but I find I can get around it by adjusting the umbrellas.

 The results I’ve gotten so far with the continuous lighting I really like, even with the difficulties of control and power, I find that the light produces effective portraits.

One problem I should note though, I haven’t been able to use a white background with these lights, I found they haven’t been powerful enough, but it might be a different story with a canvas backdrop (I use muslin).

 I've found these lights are pretty good with still life, but I'm not with still life so I can't really comment on still life lighting....

Flash Lighting

 

Advantages:

·       The lighting which I have used has modelling lamps fitted, which solves the issue of light control – the modelling light is a continuous bulb which can be controlled parallel to the flash settings, so you know what you’re getting.

·         I found that you can actually control a flash head much more compared to continuous lighting, the lights allow you to change the settings on the back of the heads.

Disadvantages:

·       Clearly disadvantaged by the pricing – even the cheap flash heads tend to be pricy compared to continuous, including more expensive bulbs.

Granted – these images have been taken as part of a University Degree, but the examples are fitting for the object of this blog – a tool to look back on.

 

This is my favourite from the shoot – mainly because of the detail in the top and the positioning of the model. I used a large soft box with a white reflector underneath the chin, creating a softer shadow on the neck.

Straight away, it’s easy to see the difference these images have compared to the continuous set. I found that using the flash heads meant I could completely control the light source and its power. The flash lighting generally produced really sharp, high contrast images in the way I was using them.

I did find it difficult however, to produce a softly lit portrait, it seemed quite difficult to get rid of the highly contrasted shadows behind the subject but I suppose it will take practice to get used to the control that these lights have.

Conclusion

Ok, so it’s not really a conclusion - I guess it’s just a summary of my findings (but I suppose that is a conclusion anyway?)

Continuous Lighting gives average results, depending on environment. I need to try the lights with a white canvas background to see how they cope. They have been best for single portraits and small still life images, any more than that has proved difficult and sometimes not possible.

Flash Lighting so far has given very good results, since I have only used them in a studio environment it would not be fair to comment on how well they would do outside say in a park or something.  It’s going to take time, but hopefully I will be able to fully control the lighting environment with flash heads, to produce really high quality images.