Dim Tungsten/Halogen Studio

[schonphotography]

<p>Hello,</p>

<p>Recently I was given several continuous lights, of which included a Lowel Omni, Lowel Tota, a 500watt tungsten, and two 250 watt tungsten lamps. I was actually about to get into studio photography when a friend gave me these, so I figured I wouldn't need to be spending thousands of dollars outfitting myself in lighting. However, when I tested them out, I found that they just don't provide enough light, especially when using umbrellas/softboxes. To get a decent exposure at f/ 5.6 and ISO 100, my shutter speed has to be around 1/10th.</p>

<p>I feel like this is abnormal, because there is so much light pouring onto the subject (1000watt key into white umbrella, 500w fill into white umbrella, then 250w hair, and the other 250's when blowing out a white background). I really don't want to have to sell off the equipment to try and re-outfit a studio with monolights, seeing as all of this equipment would probably only fetch me about $500/600, and would be a huge hassle to do.</p>

<p>Does anyone know the reason that the setup is so dim, or how to fix this?</p>

<p>Thank you for any and all suggestions, I would love to get a working studio up and running.</p>

[bob_sunley]

<p>Look at it this way, most decent mono light flash units come with a 250 watt modelling lamp. Some even have a 500 watt modelling lamp. So you have the equivalent of some normal modelling lamps.</p>

<p>Yes they are bright, but I remember working in a small studio with a 20,000 watt lighting power panel, and the owner was converting some of those high power 2000 watt lamps to electronic flash.</p>

[schonphotography]

Are there any mid-level monolights you could recommend then? Adorama's flashpoints are supposed to be quite good for the money. I

realistically only need 2 for key and fill, I might as well use the 1000w and 500w continuous lights for background, hair, etc. now that I

have them.

[jcuknz]

<p>Without knowing your lights you might be able to make a small improvement by changing the bulbs to higher wattages. A cheap but short lived solution might be to replace the photobulbs with photofloods, these use 250 watts but give 800 watts of light*, but only last for two hours, and need to be controlled in pairs by a double-pole double-throw switch to avoid the 'blowing' voltage of switching them on from cold. The switch alternately runs then in series and parrallel and during the 'switch-down' mode two bulbs are sharing mains voltage and keep the filaments warm. An electrician will understand this for you.<br>

but as Bob said that is the difference between hot and electronic lighting ... you might save yourself some money and put electronic flash into and using bits of the gear.<br>

Bear in mind also that light falls off in power at the inverse square of the distance to the subject so the lights could be useful and possibly superior to electronic for table-top photography/ small product work.<br>

I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth but rather use them for what they are suitable for.<br>

*This is in a country with 230volt mains, I don't know what the equivalent for 115v supply is, but they used to be widely used way back as a lightweight way of providing light for stills and home movie enthusiasts.</p>

[michael_madio]

<p>A good friend of mine has the Adorama Flashpoint units with the DC power pack and they work very well, especially considering the price. You generally don't want to mix hot lights and flash as there is a significant colour difference (~3K for tungsten vs ~5K for flash) unless you shoot black-and-white or colour-correct the flash units with gels (CTO). Alienbees are also popular and competitively priced.</p>

[franklin_white]

<p>Humans have a hard time accurately judging the brightness of a continuous light source (or at least humans and cameras disagree on this point). A 500 watt tungsten bulb is not bright at all (a light meter, or your camera settings, will confirm this) but, to the subject sitting right in front of the light, it will appear to be very bright (and very hot). If you plan to shoot portraits, I would recommend that you go all in with strobes and that you sell the continuous setup for whatever you can get for it from someone who shoots video. Your current setup will not be useful for background lighting for two reasons. First, as mentioned, these lights are simply not bright enough to balance well with typical key light settings and your backgrounds will often be too dark. Second, tungsten lighting is orange in color and this will not mix with the white or bluish white light from the strobes. </p>

[jcuknz]

<p>The colour of light is often measured in degrees Kelvin ... the eye can notice difference of just 150 degrees Kelvin. The Photobulb is 3200K, a Photoflood is 3400K, Halogen about that too, Electronic flash 5500K ... so the message is don't mix light sources except for artistic effect.<br>

My use of Photofloods was with Type A Kodachrome movies 1/50 shutter speed, 25 ISO film and apertures down to f/2 ... it worked well :-)<br>

I assume you are using a DSLR so 100ISO should not need to be your limit, nor f/5.6. Plus if you bring the lights closer you get more light, inverse square rule of distance/brightness.</p>