Setting up your own studio lighting
Setting up your own studio lighting | ||
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The most important difference between a flash attachment built into a camera or riding on the camera's hot shoe and studio lighting is possibilities. Flashguns have the obvious advantage of portability, but there is only so much that you can do with them. In a studio, the only constraint on what you can do with lighting is your budget. A meticulous photographer may use a dozen or more lights at once, with some focused on only a small element of the scene. But even with a couple of studio lights, a photographer can create endless light environments. A photographer's studio uses two basic types of lights. One is the xenon-based flash covered in the preceding illustrations, although in a studio they are most often called strobes. Although it's not unusual to see flashguns used as studio lights, strobes usually differ from the camera-mounted flash by being able to produce more light. Instead of the internal batteries and capacitors that generate the light in a flash attachment, several strobes may be connected to a power pack, a free-standing electrical component containing a more powerful transformer/capacitor combination that draws power from an AC outlet. The box may also be connected to the camera and have the circuits to fire all the strobes at the same time. (Alternatively, the strobes may be made to fire by radio signals sent from the camera or in reaction to the flash of a light connected directly to the camera.) The other type is continuous lighting that remains turned on instead of flashing on momentarily. Studio lighting also uses incandescent ('hot lights') and fluorescent lighting ('cool lights'). Both are variations of the common house- hold light bulb. An incandescent bulb creates light by sending electricity through a wire that resists the current's flow. Because the electrical energy can't continue through the wire, it has to go somewhere, and it does, in the form of light and heat energy. Fluorescent lights work a bit like flashguns. Electricity flows through argon gas contained in the fluorescent tubes, causing it to ionize and release electrons. The electrons strike the phosphor coat on the inside of the tube, imparting energy to the phosphors, which, in turn, release the energy in the form of light. Both incandescent and fluorescent light differ from their household cousins by being brighter and more closely attuned to the Kelvin temperature of sunlight. The capability of digital cameras to perform white balance adjustments on-the-fly makes it simpler to work with light sources that don't have the same color balance as daylight. Both incandescent and fluorescent have the advantage over strobes that they can be left on continuously, giving the photographer a chance for modeling, the art of adjusting light to bring out different highlights and shadows. All three types of light may be combined with a variety of devices that modify and control the lights. | ||