Suggestions For Product Portfolio

[Christie Photo]

I agree that if you don't have modeling lights, it's going to be harder...

It's more than harder. It's literally a shot in the dark.

Without modeling lights, one has to imagine where the light is falling and how it's acting when placing and directing the lights. When doing critical work on a small subject like food, ¼ inch or .5° angel makes all the difference.

The bottom line is it's a bad plan to attempt this sort of precision work with speedlights simply because they're available.

Continuous lighting is a much better idea. These days, with adjustable white balance, a cool bulb can be more easily used. (When shooting film, one had to choose from 5500°K or 3200°K and then filter for any variance.) And, like I said, shooting at any aperture is possible since the subject isn't moving. In fact, I'd likely use continuous lighting just for that reason.

-Pete

 

[c.cloudwalker]

I agree that if you don't have modeling lights, it's going to be harder...

It's more than harder. It's literally a shot in the dark.

Without modeling lights, one has to imagine where the light is falling and how it's acting when placing and directing the lights. When doing critical work on a small subject like food, ¼ inch or .5° angel makes all the difference.

The bottom line is it's a bad plan to attempt this sort of precision work with speedlights simply because they're available.

Agreed.

But I do not agree with the rest of your post, Pete. Although color temp is not a problem, the heat is. When someone mentioned continuous lights that stayed cool here on the forum I looked into them/it and, yes, they do exist but they are quite expensive. From what I gathered, they are used mostly in the movie business which usually has much higher budgets then we do in photography

So my vote goes to strobes. Real ones though. Not flash units.

 

[CCericola]

Last week CreatveLive had a free seminar on photographing food with Penny De Los Santos. You can still purchase the seminar. It might help you if you are more of a audio learner as opposed to reading.