Hi I'm Karl Taylor and today I thought I'd make a video about
understanding studio and flash and other types of lighting.
Now the reason is that I actually get lots of comments and questions on our
Youtube channel and elsewhere asking about flash, people see videos where I'm
using studio lighting and then they ask where's the flash
coming from and they don't seem to realize that the flash is actually
coming from the light that they're seeing.
So I thought I'd go over a few of the misconceptions
and explain some of the other technical terms associated with studio lighting.
Now here you can see a continuous light. That is an
LED light variable in adjustments in color temperature
and variable in power. There it's set on a sort of low power at the moment.
Over there is another continuous light but that one is a HMI light and you can
see it's bouncing up onto our floating ceiling
panel there those are brighter than led lights but
they're not variable in color temperature
they're daylight balanced. So the question is... Why do studio
photographers choose to use flash instead of using continuous light? ...and
hopefully that little demonstration actually gave you the answer. The answer
is that we can get an incredible amount of
more power of light from a flash than we can generally get from a continuous
light. However that very bright power of light only lasts for a
very brief instance so we decide to work with
flash knowing it's going to be very brief
because we're only taking a still photo because we want more light allowing us
to get more depth of field use different modifiers etc
one of the disadvantages of using continuous light
for studio photographers is that you really need to work
in the dark or the ability to darken your studio
because you can't take pictures with continuous light
if you have other forms of continuous light pollution
like daylight coming through your windows or your existing
lights in the building. So you need to cut all of that
out to make any form of continuous lighting
effective. Now another misconception with studio lighting, as I said, is about
where's the flash coming from and where is the continuous light
because most of the time, continuous lighting
looks like this and it looks similar. This one looks a little bit
warmer as you can see but what you're seeing there right now
is not used for the photograph, that is what we call the modeling lamp.
Now you can see the modeling lamp is on now but if I fire the flash,
the flash will fire as well, that's what's used for taking the photo.
So it's very important to understand the differences.
Now that may be a little hot, no it's okay at the moment. So
let me show you a little bit about a flash lamp head
that we can see here, so I'm just gonna take the
protective cover off that's got a little bit hot.
So I'm just gonna pull this off, now this protective cover is just in case a
modeling light blew, it's a sort of protection
element as well, it's also a UV protection in these
lights as well. So what you see here is the modeling
lamp that's the continuous light if i put it on again,
there you go and around it is actually the flash tube that's where
the flash fires from so they are two
separate entities and it's the outer flash tube which is
the one that's used for taking still photos the modeling lamp is simply used
so we can see what we're doing we don't actually use
the light from the model lamp for our photography
sometimes we do in special cases but generally we don't.
Right, the next thing... What's the difference
between this lamp head and this flash head here? You can see that this
one's significantly smaller than this one. This is the difference
between what's called a monoblock flash and a lamp head flash. Now the
reason for this one being bigger is that its power supply, that's the capacitors
that charge up to burst the power of flash out, the
capacitors are inside this head and that's why it's
called a monoblock. The capacitor for this lamp head is
actually down here in this box so this is the power
supply for this smaller lamp head. Now what that
means is generally a pack system
can have a lot more power because they're a lot bigger,
they can hold bigger capacitors and I can plug
three different lights into this one and control
all of them independently. Here I have a heavier lamp head, a much bigger
lamp head, but the capacitor and everything is
inside, however this lamp head is nowhere near
as powerful as this one. For example this one can
output 200 joules of power from that pack this
one I think is only a 400-joule lamp head. Now the other advantage of
smaller lamp heads means that when you're putting them in big
modifiers or other modifiers they tend to be more stable, they're not as likely
to tip over as easily. When you put heavier lamp
heads like this or even the bigger Siros 800 in a
modifier like that, you need to put a few sandbags on it to
keep it stable you can use that in the bigger modifiers but
obviously, it's easier to use a smaller lamp head.
Now another reason that many professional studio photographers prefer
pack systems is that all the controls for our flash
are on the ground at ground level which means we can just go over to the pack,
change the numbers, change the settings, put what we want into the pack,
and that modifies the lamp and that's especially useful
if your lamp head is way up high in a different lighting modifier because then
you don't have to get up on a ladder to reach to change the settings.
Now in saying that some of the newer lamp heads even the monoblock ones
do have wi-fi control and that means you can change
the lamp head from an iPad or your smartphone
if necessary so you don't have to actually climb up and do it but
pack systems are still quite favorable amongst many
professional photographers. Now there's one other slight variation you can get
as well you can get battery-powered studio flash systems or
location flash systems. For example, this particular model of
flash has an alternate version with a lithium battery
that plugs in the top that allows you to use the
system either in the studio or on location
and without any cables however, if you're doing lots of shoots and lots of flashes
a powered supply means you don't have to worry about the batteries
running out. Right let's talk about the next thing,
power and joules. This is one of the more powerful systems, as I said you can see it
says 3200, that means it's capable of 3200 joules
output of power and I can put 3200 joules down one power
and have that all come out of one flash if I want or I can distribute it across
three channels, three different lights and I can distribute it
asymmetrically. Now asymmetrically means I can split that power of 3200 joules up
into any ratio I like. I can have 100 joules
on one lamp, 100 on another and then 3000 on
the other lamp if I want. I can mix it and blend it around.
If you've got a symmetrical pack you may find you can only split a thousand joules,
a thousand, a thousand, etc. Now on mono lights, you've obviously
only got the amount of jewels that are in that particular lamp head
anyway so your power control is just on the
back and you adjust the power, I'll come to that in a second.
Now as I say, you'll find the power rating for the lamp written on it
somewhere this one says it's an 800, so this
is an 800 joule lamp. Now, what does 800 joules mean?
Because we get a lot of questions from people saying;
Should I go for an 800 joule or should i go for a 400 joule lamp or
should I go for a 1200 joule? ... and they seem to think there's this
massive, massive difference between them but actually, there isn't that much
difference for example an 800 joule lamp is only one
stop brighter than a 400 joule lamp okay, it's exactly the same
as the change in ratio stops of ISO for example.
So if we shot an 800 dual lamp at f11 then we would need to shoot a 400 dual
lamp at f8. So it's just that one-stop
difference or alternatively we could just put the
ISO up from 100 to 200 to take the 400 lamp to
equivalent to the 800. So joules on lamp heads
or power packs are basically the same in f-stops so
a 400 dual lamp, an 800 is one stop more powerful,
a 1600 dual lamp head is another stop more powerful and a
3200 dual pack is another stop powerful. So you just need to think about it in
f-stops. Now while we're on the subject of
f-stops let's talk about power range. So on this particular pack i can go from
power 10 which is now 3 200 joules and i can go
down to power 9 which would now be half of that at 1600 joules, that would
be equivalent to 800 joules, that would be
equivalent to 400 joules, 200 joules etc. as you can see.
Now, of course, we can go in 1/10th of an f-stop as well, so we can adjust in
tenths of an f-stop for really precise control. Now this particular
lamp head allows me to go from 3200 joules
almost down to about three joules so it's a huge
power range in that professional level power pack. On monoblocks the range
isn't usually as great but it can still be pretty good.
So on this lamp head, i can take the power up to 10
which is going to give me 800 joules, power 9
will give me 400 joules, power 8 200 joules, 100 joules,
50 joules, 25, 13, 6.5,
4, 5 and that's it. So my power range isn't as great and i
can only go down to power 2 whereas i can go down to power
0.5 as it stands at the moment on this
particular lamphead. So I've got greater versatility
in the amount of joules control with the pack system
compared to the monoblock system but in saying that this particular model is
still very good. Now we still have a modeling light on
this light so we can turn the modeling light on and off and
use the modeling light in low power or in brighter settings as well, we still
have a test button. Let's turn the power up on there and
fire that again so you can see here. Now the other thing
to consider is; What are we talking about in changing
that light? ... because a lot of people get confused. So
let's say for example you used power 8
people think that a one-stop drop in light would need to be power 4 but
that's not how it works with studio lighting.
If we were shooting at f11 and that and power 8 was correct at
f11 then if we wanted to shoot at f8 that is the one-stop
less light okay so one-stop less of light
is one whole number down, not half the amount on the power settings
and then again this has 10th of an f-stop
control as well. Now, how do we trigger flashes? How do you
fire flashes? Well we use these, these are a triggering device and this goes on top
of the camera, usually sits on the hot shoe so, for
example, you slide it onto your camera, here's a
medium format Hasselblad camera and then when you press the shutter
button sends the signal to the pack or to the receiver and that will fire
the flash at exactly the right moment. We also have a test button as you can
see which is allowing me to fire the flash just by pressing the test button.
I can also control up and down some of the power settings
via the trigger as well. So that's how we trigger our flashes. Now finally,
other advantages of pack systems, yes they are a lot more expensive
but they have some very advanced features
as well. For example with this particular broncolor Scoro pack
I have the ability to link it to another pack, I can do
multiple flashes to allow me to reach even 50
flashes per second between two packs, we are able to shoot very rapid flash
bursts if we need to, I have color temperature adjustment so i
can change the color balance of the actual
output of the light as well and really importantly with this one
I have full control over the flash duration, that's the burst of light,
and how long it lasts for which basically allows you to
freeze super, super fast-moving objects like liquid splashes etc. So
hope that gave you a good overview of studio flashlighting
and clears up some of those misconceptions.
I'm Karl Taylor thanks very much for watching. Get my completely free
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to KarlTaylorEducation.com