Stephen Eastwood|Beauty and Fashion Photographer

Lighting Recommendations?

Q. What lighting do you use and what do you recommend for differing budgets and styles of use?

OK, lets start with I use many different types of lights and even more different brands, I use strobes, fluorescent, hotlights, LED's, HMI's, HID's, hotshoe, battery powered, speedlights, mini slaves, maglights, flashlights, blacklights and underwater lights so there is no real answer, other than it depends on when and where and for what and why, and my mood. That said, my main strobes are Broncolor, now Verso line, and Speedotron Blackline, and I have recently picked up several Hensel porty premium packs and heads and ringflash and octahaze and beautydishes that make very nice and less expensive alternatives to the Broncolor Verso line when that is not in budget. I use Lumedynes and find them extremely valuable in there small size and ability to put them anywhere and have 400-800ws with only one booster on and ac adapters and modeling lights when needed. I use Canon Speedlights and think highly of the E-TTL system when one learns to use it efficiently. More on that can be found here Using the Canon E-ttl System And I also highly recommend the small and very inexpensive Vivitar 285HV lights and show how they can be mixed and matched with full strobes and even with digital point and shoots when needed, and some of that can be learned here Using Strobes with Point and Shoot Digital's. As for fluorescent I find Kinoflo and a very affordable alternative www.coolights.biz which makes great lighting products in fluorescent, tungsten and hmi's at very affordable prices.

As for strobes here is a ranking of brands in my opinion from a post I had made on a forum not too long ago.

Would need an idea of how much you would like to put on that plastic. Pack/heads have advantages, but generally cost more and you need more than one pack to have any sort of redundancy where as each mono is its own so taking two gives you redundancy if one goes, in other words taking two heads and one pack is great if one head goes you still have one, if the pack goes you have two useless heads with you, so you need two packs min, in that case monos are better, also each mono is completely independent of each other and can be adjusted separately. I would say the best investment is to get a setup that has both available that way you could mix and match as funds are available and all the modifiers and speedrings would be interchangeable.

As far as brands, I think it goes like this

Best broncolor verso packs,
than profoto 7 series
Profoto D4
Elinchrom
hensel
balcar
speedotron blackline pack and heads and mono force series
comet
White lightening zeus 2400ws pack head system
dynalite pack head systems
calumet/bowens
White lightening Zeus 1200 ws pack head system
White lightening monos
alienbee
Norman
Speedotron brownline
dynalite monos
jtl
sp Excalibur
novatron
britek
interfit

Location units include lumedyne and quantum systems which fit between white lightening and alienbee, vivitar 285hv is great on camera or off small hotshoe type strobe and cheap, great slaves as well, and brand specific Canon ettl or Nikon ittl hotshoe speedlights like the Canon 580exII or Nikon sb 800 which I would place as on par with alienbee 400 and 800 units in power output and a compromise between more versatile in size and usage but less versatile in ease of use no modeling light and alienbees have far greater range of accessories and modifiers available.

If your looking at specialty lighting like ringflashes broncolor, profoto, hensel, lumdyne, white lightening zeus packs, elinchrom all have for pack heads and alienbee has a mono version, lower in power than the others but very well priced.

Speedotron black can have a hensel, profoto and possibly broncolor ring adapted at a number of places to work on their packs as well.

Lightsticks are broncolor and profoto only.

Lightbars, broncolor, profoto and hensel.

Fresnel's (strobe) Speedotron blackline up to 4800ws, broncolor up to 6400 ws, profoto 2400 or maybe 4800ws not certain, Hensel, NS of the rating, elinchrom NS of rating. I am sure there are others and many can be adapted to fit either packs or even a few that can be modified to fit a small mono inside an old large Fresnel hotlight fixture, but the best results are from units designed from the ground up as the placement of the light is where it should be for the proper effect.
If you want to overpower daylight check the forums for that or read here first to see how much power you will need at what distance/f stop/desired degree of darkening http://stepheneastwood.com/tutorials/skychart/skychart.htm
then decide what will work for you.

This is not all inclusive by any means.

As for mainly portable and travel packs here is a post I had made on those in particular.

Well it depends on how much light, inside or out and how much weight.

I use Broncolor Verso 2400 packs and heads, amazing and battery, also the most expensive around and heavy.

I also have many hensel porty packs and head 1200 ws also heavy and big but plenty of power and much cheaper (not cheap however by many forum posters standards)

Next would be Lumedyne systems, they can be expensive new but found very inexpensive on ebay, they are very small and a typical pack and two heads will be either 200ws (very inexpensive to find on ebay) or the better 400ws packs, its limited in versatility in that it is 50, 100, 200, 400ws selections and symmetrical only, you can add boosters up to 2400ws, but that start getting very big, I do recommend at least one 400 or 200ws booster to get a pack up to 600-800ws however. They have small modeling lights, very low power but plenty bright to see to focus in the dark. And they are battery, and can also use AC adapters, the smallest yet biggest bang for the buck. The heads are so small that they can fit where no other 400ws strobe can, and they can take softboxes, grids, reflectors umbrellas, most things, and have a ringflash now that is 1200ws with modeling lights which s of the same design as the hensel ringflash. Newer units have more control and versatility but the cost is much higher.

Next dedicated speedlights, Canon, Nikon, etc, they are small, have decent power and an ability to high speed synch which may be worth a lot if trying to overpower the sun and you do not have enough actual power to do it. They have no real modeling light, and are limited to batteries, but can often be plugged into an external battery pack for better recycle and longer run times.

Next the Vivitar 285hv or even the 283 and little manual switch you can get for 20$ to give you manual power settings on a 283. They are battery powered and suffer the same issues as above, cannot do a high speed sync, and offer approximately the same power levels as the speedlights perhaps one stop less than the highest speedlight available, but they are workhorses, and go for years, they are used most often as strobes in manual for great consistent results and work well, can take high voltage battery packs for faster recycle and longer runtimes and best of all they typically run under 90$ new per unit so multiples are a viable option to many of the above setup for a similar price point and you could actually but 40 or more for the price of a verso pack, so its a great Value even if you just grab two as back lights/accent lights to have in a bag.