Lighting is so hard to buy. What should I get? Profoto? Bowens? Monolight vs heads?

[bdubbs79]

Hey I've posted before trying to get some feedback on what to get. I am starting with portraits, some for business websites, business cards, and headshots for models etc. I want to be able to successfully shoot a model full length as well as head shots.

And then on the side, I'd like to get some great light for outdoors if I do family shots on the beaches here in San Diego.. as it's popular and I have products and want to shoot products.

So I'm ok with spending a little, but I'm interested to hear if I should go for 2 more expensive lights on a system like profoto or bowens 2 head kit and then add on the soft box and stuff or should I get a few monolights and manually control them? This is such a headache. if you want to tell me what you use and what you shoot as subjects so I can get an idea.

I was thinking of getting 3 monolights from Alien Bees or White Lightning and their softboxes... and go from there or if someone has had some bad experiences or konw of better more evenly lit kits for $2,000 range or so? What about a portable power source? Is it crucial? I'm sorry for having so much in one post. Help if you can...

Thanks
Brandon

 

[Derrel]

San Diego, right? You can surely rent some lighting gear, to see what you need, and what you like. You probably cannot rent Alien Bee lights, but maybe you can. Or, maybe you could rent the slightly higher-end White Lightning monolights. Lighting in "kit" form is typically really cheap junk, or low-priced stuff, or fairly expensive to outrageously overpriced. it really does run the gamut; at the lower end, kit lighting seems to be priced fairly reasonably to me, and fairly priced. Calumet Genesis kits for example, are affordable low-priced lights. Cheap junky-level lights would be the CowXXX Studio type of lights with NON-interchangeable flashtubes--those are basically "disposable" monolights.

Monolights in the lower watt-second range are affordable, and give a good amount of power for the dollar spent. See Calumet Genesis, Adorama.com's Flashpoint 320-M, etc,etc. for low-priced, fair-priced monos.

Moving up, the Alien Bees are significantly higher-priced. Sure, they break down a lot, but they have good customer service, and they're always willing to send you out a new light when one craps out. People talk about how great their customer service is, because, frankly, these lights need a lot of service, for one reason or another. They are assembled in the USA, from foreign-made components. Don't be fooled.

At the higher end, are much more-powerful monolights from Profoto, Speedotron, and other companies. The one issue is: once you start getting into the need for 400 to 800 wat-seconds PER HEAD, monolights become very,very expensive compared with the box-and-cable systems like the Speedotron Black Line, which has a LOT of 2,400 watt-second packs available used for $375 to $550---and which have SIX head outlets per pack. Profoto likes to ream its customers, and is the king of the 2-outlet, overpriced pack systems.

A second criteria to think about is "analog" versus "digital" flash control: most of the pure sine wave inverters (portable,location powering systems for flash units) do NOT work with the newer "digital" types of flash units. Innovatronix and Paul C. Buff both make portable sine wave inverters. The Innovatronix web site has a list of compatible flash systems that are proven to work with their products.

Buying lighting demands research. Calumet has a lot of information on studio flash units. The info can be hard to find. Speedotron, Norman, DynaLite, Bowens,Calumet,Photogenic, all those companies have some nice stuff. Profoto is, IMHO, simply too expensive for what it has in features--too few outlets, and too much dough for those few outlets.

 

[Village Idiot]

Hey I've posted before trying to get some feedback on what to get. I am starting with portraits, some for business websites, business cards, and headshots for models etc. I want to be able to successfully shoot a model full length as well as head shots.

And then on the side, I'd like to get some great light for outdoors if I do family shots on the beaches here in San Diego.. as it's popular and I have products and want to shoot products.

So I'm ok with spending a little, but I'm interested to hear if I should go for 2 more expensive lights on a system like profoto or bowens 2 head kit and then add on the soft box and stuff or should I get a few monolights and manually control them? This is such a headache. if you want to tell me what you use and what you shoot as subjects so I can get an idea.

I was thinking of getting 3 monolights from Alien Bees or White Lightning and their softboxes... and go from there or if someone has had some bad experiences or konw of better more evenly lit kits for $2,000 range or so? What about a portable power source? Is it crucial? I'm sorry for having so much in one post. Help if you can...

Thanks
Brandon

If you're shooting outside, you'll want to figure out what time of day and what modifiers you're going to be using. The Alien Bee B800 is a popular light at only $279, but it's also only 320w/s. If you're shooting in bright sun light with a modifier and you want to be able to overpower the sun, you're going to have a hard time doing it. I'd personally recommend at least 600w/s for those conditions.

The flipside to that is that if you're shooting inside or in an area where ambient isn't going to be a problem, then 600+w/s of light can easily become overkill and your flashes may not be able to be turned down enough. For something like that you could always try an ND filter.

Also, how desirable is portability? If you go with something like a 2400w/s speedotron pack and 5 heads, you're going to be lugging around a ton of equipment that's heavy. You'll have a battery, a pack that weighs a ton, and the rest of the stands and heads to go with it vs. having something like 2-3 monolights and a battery. There's trade offs to each system so you need to know what you want in a lighting system before you dive in an purchase one. I have a Speedotron system with 2 packs and 5 heads, but after using it this last year, I'm seriously looking at Dynalite. There's a guy in the local Strobist group that has a setup that I'm going to play with for a day and see if it can't cut it. Right now, I have a case that weighs about 125lbs with just the packs, heads, and cables. That's not including modifiers, stands, battery, and camers bag. Most of my stuff is shot on location, so I could really go for a light weight solution. The price of used Speedo gear was too good to pass up for the kit I bought.