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Studio Photography
"Cold lights" are electronic flashes, much more
powerful than the ones on your camera but basically
the same idea. Studio strobes come in two flavors:
monolights and powerpack/head systems. The
business end of both is the same, a flash tube
surrounding an incandescent bulb. The incandescent
bulb, usually around 100 watts, is the "modeling
light," used by the photographer to judge lighting
effects and ratios. These aren't very effective if the
ambient light in the studio, e.g., from windows, is
high. Most photographers burn a few Polaroids to
make sure that the lights are properly set.
A monolight has a wall outlet on one end, a flash tube
on the other, and a big block of capacitors in between.
These are nice for location work because you don't
have have a lot of cables running around. Using
several monolights together isn't as much of a problem as you'd think because (1) good monolights have
a 4 or 5 f-stop output adjustment control, and (2) most monolights have a built-in slave so that when one
fires, they will all fire.
In a powerpack/head system, you have one big heavy capacitor-filled power pack and a bunch of
relatively lightweight heads connected by high-voltage cables to the powerpack. You can adjust the
lighting power among the heads and also the overall light output. These are the most flexible and most
commonly used studio flash systems. Flash power is specified in watt-seconds (joules), somewhat
confusingly abbreviated as "w/s".
Choosing a brand of studio strobes is a similar process to choosing an SLR camera system. If you buy
the wrong brand, you may have to scrap your entire investment as your ambitions grow. I don't have
enough experience with monolights to suggest a brand, but Sunpaks are cheap (around $350 each for
400 w/s) and have been around for a long time. I certainly wouldn't buy anything cheaper or more
obscure than those. Calumet sells some 750 w/s monolights (around $500) with a 5-stop output
adjustment and I would think they would be easier to work with, especially because they take all the
light-control accessories made for standard Calumet flash heads.
http://www.photo.net/studio/primer (4 of 17)7/3/2005 2:18:01 AM