What one light setup to buy?

[redbourn]

I read earlier in the thread not to mix light sources but assumed that I could mix any electrical one with natural light.

So if I use CFL or tungsten, I have to make the room as dark as possible?

Thanks for all the info and the encouragement.

I am a hobby chef and the book is really to help beginners or people that believe they will never learn how to cook.

And it will have lots of tips and tricks to help them succeed.

I decided to do the book because so many online recipes have mistakes: wrong portion sizes and timings etc. and they don't have both American and metric measurements.

It's so sad to follow a recipe faithfully only to have some horrible failure and it puts many people off of cooking.

Well, as dark as you need it to be so that only the continuous light is lighting the food. Continuous is of course WYSIWYG so how you view the lighting through the lens is how it's going to look.

With a flash, you can change the settings so that even though the room is lit up with tungsten, fluorescent, and 5 different light with different colors, it can easily overpower those lights with the right settings.

And then there's the other edge of that blade. If a flash is too bright, it can often be hard to use a wider aperture to get the DOF you're looking for. You may have to result to ND filters or other tricks.

You can find a 200W adorama flash for about $200 IIRC. Also, a monolight like that won't require batteries.

Thanks for the feedback.

Just posted this

Mixing daylight and CFL | Photography Forum

Michael

 

[Scatterbrained]

Derrels' advice earlier about making your own scrim and reflector is spot on. Umbrellas and softboxes are fine for portraits, but not needed for still lifes (and actually undesirable). I personally use a roll of vellum (tracing paper) and white poster board, coupled with the occasional mirror.

Diffusion panels (scrims) are better than softboxes for this sort of thing because: you can adjust the angle of the light relative to the panel, you don't have the black border of a softbox reflecting in your dishes, you don't have the ribs of an umbrella showing up in your highlight, you can place flags behind the diffusion panel to lower the light intensity in a specific area without creating a hard shadow from the flag, you can adjust the distance between the diffusion panel and the light to effect light falloff and intensity in the scene, diffusion panels are easy to store and set up, and they are cheap.

You can use white foamcore for reflector panels to provide soft fill on the shadow side, or you can use mirrors to create targeted highlights along edges. These things are cheap, versatile, and usually available at a good craft store or art supply house.

You can use halogen or LED worklights from a hardware store for "what you see is what you get" lighting. They are cheap, and much brighter than any household bulb you're going to find. Then it's a matter of blocking the light coming into the room and turning off the room lights.

If you go to YouTube and check out "Learn My Shot" they have several videos dealing with continuous light shooting. Granted they deal with cheap clamp lights in a darkened studio, but you can just as easily buy more powerful worklights from a hardware store, and they often come with their own stand too.

 

[redbourn]

Derrels' advice earlier about making your own scrim and reflector is spot on. Umbrellas and softboxes are fine for portraits, but not needed for still lifes (and actually undesirable). I personally use a roll of vellum (tracing paper) and white poster board, coupled with the occasional mirror.

Diffusion panels (scrims) are better than softboxes for this sort of thing because: you can adjust the angle of the light relative to the panel, you don't have the black border of a softbox reflecting in your dishes, you don't have the ribs of an umbrella showing up in your highlight, you can place flags behind the diffusion panel to lower the light intensity in a specific area without creating a hard shadow from the flag, you can adjust the distance between the diffusion panel and the light to effect light falloff and intensity in the scene, diffusion panels are easy to store and set up, and they are cheap.

You can use white foamcore for reflector panels to provide soft fill on the shadow side, or you can use mirrors to create targeted highlights along edges. These things are cheap, versatile, and usually available at a good craft store or art supply house.

You can use halogen or LED worklights from a hardware store for "what you see is what you get" lighting. They are cheap, and much brighter than any household bulb you're going to find. Then it's a matter of blocking the light coming into the room and turning off the room lights.

If you go to YouTube and check out "Learn My Shot" they have several videos dealing with continuous light shooting. Granted they deal with cheap clamp lights in a darkened studio, but you can just as easily buy more powerful worklights from a hardware store, and they often come with their own stand too.

Thanks for the feedback and I will check the Youtube link.

 

[Punisher911]

As far as "overpowering" your ambient light with your speedlight or whatever you end up with.. Higher shutter speeds will limit the ambient light in your exposure and using a large aperture with allow more of your flash/strobe into your exposure allowing you to "overpower" the less than satisfactory or non-matching light colors from the room lighting.

Or if your budget allows, buy a nice Alien Bees or some other powerful strobe or continuous light source and turn off or dim the ambient/room lighting.

 

[Village Idiot]

As far as "overpowering" your ambient light with your speedlight or whatever you end up with.. Higher shutter speeds will limit the ambient light in your exposure and using a large aperture with allow more of your flash/strobe into your exposure allowing you to "overpower" the less than satisfactory or non-matching light colors from the room lighting.

Or if your budget allows, buy a nice Alien Bees or some other powerful strobe or continuous light source and turn off or dim the ambient/room lighting.

Up until your x sync. If you're not able to block out all the ambient by 1/200 or 1/250, you're generally SOL on that front.

 

[Punisher911]

What about speedlights with high speed sync?