The three main sorts of studio lighting

If you like this article, please do share it around, and if you want to learn more, I have my live course this Sunday! Which will be displayed through Zoom and broadcast from the studio at Georges Cameras you can sign up to it here.

I want to start by saying anyone can learn these skills! It does take time, patience and a great deal of care, not every photo will be good, not every shoot will be a success, but each one can teach you something.

Lots of people jump right into the deep end, buying all sorts of lighting equipment.

I want to start by explaining the difference and advantages of the three main types of light sources, before you go and get stuff you don’t need.

Strobe

This is just a fancy word for flash. Traditionally strobes have been the main light source for photographers, and with good reason, a strobe can be very powerful, and doesn’t heat up a room, or your model, and the flash duration is short, and if you get it really short (like under 1/1000 of a second) you can capture some great action shots.

With strobes power is super important, because the bigger the space you want to fill, the more power you need, that applies to lighting modifiers as well, whether it be large umbrellas, soft boxes or my favourite parabolic reflectors like the one to the left.

Generally speaking strobes come in three forms:

Speedlites which you can fit on top of you camera.

Monobloc’s like the Profoto B10 or Godox AD400

Powerpack’s like the Profoto Pro10 or Broncolor Scoro.

There’s three things when it comes to these categories, power and price. Speedlite’s you can pick up a good one for around $300-600 and can output around 80 watt seconds of power. Monobloc’s start at 250 watt seconds and go up to 1000 for the top end heads, and start at around $1000 for the low end, and $2000 for the good stuff. Finally power packs start at 1200 watt seconds and shoot up to 2400… They do tend to be a little more expensive starting at around $15,000 for the power pack, and then a further $2500 per head, you’d have to be doing some serious work to need this sort of power.

Generally with strobes there are a variety of lighting modifiers you can attach. With speedlite’s, I’ll admit the modifiers are quite cumbersome, whereas monobloc’s and powerpack’s tend to use various mount systems to attach a variety of fixtures to your light that change the light properties, direction and shape.

TLDR: Strobe lights are flexible but learning to control them takes time and patience.

Constant

Constant light as the name suggests is continuous, it’s often called continuous as well, it’s not been the industry standard for photography for a variety of reasons, one of the biggest ones is heat, unlike strobes, constant light tends to get hot, if you’re in studio space this can really suck really quickly, when you and your team start working up quite the sweat. Over the years, technology has improved, and with the current generation of LED lights, we’re starting to see more power with less heat.

Constant lights could be anything from your hardware lights, to LED panels like the SunwayFoto Fl-120 or something big and bad ass like my favourite Aputure 300D Mk II . Generally with constant light it’s harder to modify the light source because the power output is so much lower than a strobe, the advantage of the Aputure light is that it has a mounting solution that allows you to attach a variety of different modifiers to it to change the properties of the light. It does not have the power of a strobe, however it’s a lot more easy to predict and see the lighting result, as you’re not having to take a photo to figure out what the result looks like.

TLDR: Constant light is easier to control because you can see what’s happening, but there is less ways to modify it.

I did say there were three sorts of light though, the final one is you guessed it…

Natural Light

Most people would not call this a studio light, however, we can shape natural light using so many different tools that we’d use for both constant and strobe, I can’t really pass up its significant as a studio lighting tool. The difference being, the tools you use to modify natural light, are often time of day (hint* the light is often easiest to control and most flattering at sunrise and sunset), and the place you shoot (northerly aspect, window size and location, etc etc). If you don’t like the idea of using either of the above tools, I can’t stress the importance of these tools reflectors, and diffusers. My favourite for shooting one person is the ideally sized 1x2m Lastolite Skylite Rapid mainly because you can fit a whole person under it, and in the kit it comes with ways to diffuse, and reflect the light changing the properties of how your light looks.

I’ll leave it at that for now!

I hope this helped get your head around some of the lighting types.

These are some examples from my own work, every second shot is with constant or natural light: