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You don’t have to spend a fortune to shoot people pix like the pros!
 Do your portraits say Fred Schmertz when you were going for Richard Avedon? If you’re lighting them with a single on-camera flash, bingo! We may have found the problem. But to solve it, must you sink $12,000 into a pro-caliber studio lighting setup? No! Many companies offer low-cost, home studio kits that come with lightstands, reflectors, and light modifiers (umbrellas or softboxes)—for under $1,000. With these, you can light like a pro. The kits offer benefits such as:
- Multiple free-standing lights that let you use one source as your main light and a second to illuminate the shadows. With this technique, you can create a delicate interplay of highlight and shadow that conveys depth, dimension, and shaping, and can pop your subject into (the appearance of) three dimensions.
- Lights that you can position free of the camera to control relative background/foreground illumination.
- A wider range of apertures and shutter speeds, since these lights can be moved closer or farther from your model. This lets you render a background sharp, blurry, shadowy, or bright.
- Softboxes and umbrellas that can soften, feather, and broaden light output, or otherwise modify the light for just the right effect.
- Studio strobes are more powerful, and typically recycle faster, than their on-camera brethren. You’ll appreciate that when trying to keep up with expressions that can fly across the face of a four-year-old.
- Which studio kit is right for you? We tried out four of the most popular. Here’s what we found.
Hot Lights Or Strobes?
Like many things in photography, choosing between hot lights and strobes ain’t an easy choice! Hot lights (a.k.a. tungsten floods) are a continuous, what-you-see-is-what-you-get light source, while strobes (a.k.a. flash) offer instantaneous bursts. For that reason, it can be difficult to gauge lighting effects with strobes. Other distinguishing factors:
- You can use hot lights with still or video cameras; flash with still only.
- Hot lights tend to be less expensive than flash, and, unlike strobe lighting, they require no special meters.
- Hot lights once posed color temperature problems, but in this digital era of automatic white balance, the issue is diminishing in importance.
- Strobes don’t get hot, which usually makes for a more comfortable and safer shooting environment.
- Strobes also tend to throw more light, which gives wider selection of exposures (i.e., smaller apertures, faster shutter speeds).
- Strobes are less taxing on an electrical system, posing an intermittent, not constant power demand. Result: fewer blown circuits.
- Strobes usually offer variable output, while floods have only on and off.
- The instantaneous burst from a flash will freeze camera or subject motion, making sharp pictures under circumstances where tungsten can’t.
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