Continuous Lighting for food photography

Hello everyone,

 

I am not very good at lightning equipment and we want to buy lights at work. I shoot food. I asked some friends and said that octabox would be great for that purpose with a continuous light equipment. No I want to know what is the best for what for example, if a continuous light with 300W what ocabox size should I get for it? And is a 300W enough? Let us keep in mind that we don't shoot very big projects.

Continuous lights can generate a lot of heat which isn't good for how food looks. And, depending on the purpose and level of photo quality you're after, you'll likely need much more than 300w.

 

A typical setup we used was a couple of 6'x6' diffuser screens over the top of the subject with 2 or 3 strobes (500-1200ws) shooting through those. Depending on what we were shooting these might be shifted closer to the camera position. The idea was to have very broad very diffuse light of the subject. We'd then use 1 or 2 strobes with snoots to create highlights. The room was kept about 60°f so that the food wasn't affected too much (this even though it usually had a gob of hairspray, gel or other gook on it). These were product shots for product packaging and ads.

 

Shots for restaurant product would be considerably different.

I would also recommend flash over continuous lighting, but that comes with greater cost and complexity for your initial set up. If you do decide to go with continuous lighting, make sure that you also acquire a good tripod so that you don't wind up having to set ISO up high to get a fast enough shutter speed to hand hod the camera and get enough depth of field.