What Type of Lights to Use for Photo Shoot

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Part of the video series: How to Photograph a Model: Photo Studio Tips

Summary: Watch an overview of the lights, both tungsten and strobe, reflectors, tripods and stands used for a pro photo shoot with expert photography tips from a professional photographer in this free online photography instructional video clip.

Views: 5,153 | Tags: home, photography, lighting, camera, photo, flash, model, photographer, umbrella, sudio, glamour


About the Expert

Rob Mitchell Rob Mitchell has been shooting fashion for more than 15 years, having worked with some of the country’s top models and magazines. He has worked on the Miss Un... read more

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Video Transcript

What Type of Lights to Use for Photo Shoot

Hi, I'm Rob Mitchell on behalf of Expert Village. Today we are going to be starting off our series on setting up your photo studio and lighting with a general look at some of the different tools that we have to work with. In our studio, the most common thing to use is the studio flash or the strobe. We will be getting into that, but at first we are going to start with the tungsten light. Not very practical and not really a lot of people are lighting with tungsten in these days because of certain drawbacks. Mainly, the heat that comes off it, and it's not quite as bright as a studio strobe. But we are going to start off with the tungsten light because it is going to let you see the changes in the light as we move it around the model's face, move it closer, use reflectors. You'll actually be able to see those. After you've mastered and completely understand what's going on with tungsten, then we are going to go into the studio and we are going to use the studio strobe. The strobe has a modeling light which lets you have some sort of an idea of what you are getting when you are lighting your subject, but it's not really as easy as when you are using a tungsten light. Therefore you've got to understand your strobe light, you've got to understand when you move it around your model and place it in different places, exactly what you're going to get. So we are going to get to all that. We are going to cover umbrellas, we are going to cover reflectors. A lot of this stuff gets very expensive. You can go to a lot of the camera stores and you can drop an awful lot of money very quickly. I'm going to show you a couple of little tricks that is going to save you a few dollars, too, and still make you looking really professional. We'll get into lighting kits, again, different types of umbrellas, the studio strobe, the power pack, the difference between the power packs, why you might want one over another. The light meter, your best friend, although today with digital cameras you don't have to go out and spend a lot of money on a light meter. You can just use your digital camera, keep checking on the back, and when you get the right exposure, that's it. But there are a lot of inexpensive light meters, too, that you can check out. Lighting stands, different sizes, portablilty, weight, what you should look for, as well as tripods. Tripods start anywhere from ten dollars for a little mini tripod that you can put on your table, up to hundreds, well, even thousands of dollars. I don't think you'll really need to go that high for what your going to be doing. But, I'm going to show you some that are really light weight, your going to be able to travel with, even stick it in the suitcase. Little mini ones that we can take with us, you can put them on top of a mailbox to shoot, on top of logs if you're shooting outdoors in the forest. So, it's all the versatile things that we can use here. So, we're going to get right into it. Stay tuned.

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