Camera Lighting
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- vaxorcist0
Honestly, designers with thousands of $$ worth of high-tech lighting gear always make me chuckle a bit.... I've worked with guys who have lunchmoney invested in a bunch of old sunpaks and wires and homemade snoots, blackwrap, clamps and lightstands and convertible umbrellas who know that where you put the light is much more important than how sophisticated it is or how much it cost.... such hi-tech tricks as a paper towel taped to the flash is sometimes the answer....
- Coffeemaker0
^
- joewigdahlphoto0
I generally agree with sticking with strobes for lighting but there are a few instances where continuous is a good option. Kino-flo lights are daylight color balanced flicker free fluorescent continuous lights that are nice to use when you need a large diffuse light source but don't have the space to set up an extra large bank light or octabank. Kinoflos have a profile of about 6 inches and are light enough to stick to a wall with velcro or suction cups. A chimera bank of the same size has a profile of about 3-3.5 feet and makes it really difficult to use in a small space.
the other time i would use continous lighting is if i needed to create a really fine, extremely sharp specular highlight on something. Using a small hotlight like a mini mole or a pepper light you can do it much better than you can with any strobe because the light source of those hotlights use a very small point of light created by an electric arc. Because it's so much smaller than any strobe flash light source you can create much higher contrast images- so you can use it for specular highlights that are crisper than strobe or sharper edged shadows than you could do with a strobe in some situations.