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You, my friend, are in amazing luck, because there is a really awesome website dedicated to strobes (more specifically off-camera lighting). I highly, highly recommend checking out http://strobist.blogspot.com/ The Lighting 101 series is a great beginner guide to getting started with strobes. To better answer your question here, it would help to know your ...

Studio strobes: + More light means lower ISO, larger aperture etc. + Can freeze motion + Can overpower the ambient light meaning you can leave the room lights on to see what you're doing + Greater choice of flash units / accessories / lighting modifiers + Can be used with battery pack for location shoots - Have to be triggered somehow - Need to use a ...

No, there is no way to convert guide numbers to watt-seconds. Watt-seconds is a measurement of how much energy is used by the flash, not how much light is put out. A significant portion of this energy is wasted as heat, infrared, ultraviolet, etc. A 4 watt-second flash that is 100% efficient will put out the same amount of light as a 400 watt-second flash ...

My apologies for linking to Strobist all the time, but as it happens there is a recent post just about that. He lists PocketWizard Plus II Transceiver as the best and most reliable, followed by RadioPopper JrX, AlienBees CyberSyncs, and Elinchrom Skyports. You also might want to check out RadioPopper PX, which looks like it might be able to trigger slave ...

Fresnel spots are one of the traditional studio-lighting tools, carried over from theatre and movie work; they allow focusing the light from wide to narrow, just like the zoom function on a flashgun. For example this one from Elinchrom, or these Broncolors. The reason you don't see them often is that, like a scrim, snoot, honeycomb, or other tools, they're ...

I'll give you my experience... I started out using halogen continuous lights because they were cheap, but they're very hot and draw a lot of power. Nevertheless, I could get some very powerful lighting though, mind you, I went the "Home Depot" route here. What I discovered, however, is that I had no real effective way of performing light modification ...

Narrowing the aperture will reduce all light coming in to the sensor, including light coming from the flash itself and ambient light. Reducing the flash power changes the ratio of flash light to ambient light. True, it will reduce the overall amount of light, but the reduction is not as evenly distributed as when you reduce the aperture (which reduces ...

Can you give us an idea of your budget, and what you're looking at? You get what you pay for holds true for strobes. There are a few caveats to strobes, which makes this a difficult question to answer. Not all wattage ratings are the same. Just because a strobe is rated at 250W doesn't mean it actually is. Especially when buying from Ebay only companies, ...

The amount of illumination increases as you add more strobes, but not linearly. The point of diminishing returns is, basically, right away. This is because flash power is proportional to the square of the guide number. Or to look at it the other way around, the guide number is related to the square root of the flash power. Why all these powers and roots? ...

The heat's one thing -- and you can get around that with cool lights (fluorescent, LED or HMI) -- but the biggest difference for me is that continuous lighting needs to be pretty darned bright in order to use relatively low ISOs and reasonable shutter speeds. That's just uncomfortable for everybody -- and it leads to squinting and those loverly junkie-style ...

Fresnel lens are rarely used in studio strobes because in studio we mostly need soft light, not the hard one. And if we need hard light, we can always use standard reflector. And if we need spot light, we can always use tube reflector. Fresnel are used on hot-shoe light because there are different focal lengths of different lens, the hot-shoe light is ...

Using wireless triggers is certainly one way to do this. Cheap triggers such as Cactus, Phottix, Pixl are all good choices, all the way up to PocketWizards. Or you can get some cheap hot shoe adapters with a cord. Disadvantages are that you won't have TTL / Automatic flash mode. You'll have to set the power manually. check out Strobist on information for ...

It does depend on what coverage is needed. If you have been asked to get everyone as they walk on stage, my advice is shoot on camera and get the shot. Otherwise, When faced with that situation I have bounced, with a small reflector hand held just over the flash. Pocket wizards or the cheaper Photix mean you can do off camera lighting. I have shot a few ...

I have some of the "eBay" triggers that I bought a year ago. I found them at mpex.com (Midwest Photo Exchange). They are the Cactus V2's and are $30 for a receiver and transmitter. I feel like it was a good deal, considering the price of a PocketWizard. They obviously are not as reliable as the pro equipment but for an amateur like myself, they work ...

I've previously used Cactus V2s which were good enough but occasionally failed in front of people which makes you look bad and gets you in a flap. Not good. I've just ordered a set of Cactus V5. If you remember to give me a nudge next week, I'll let you know how I get on with them. There's no TTL stuff, but the range and reliability is supposedly improved. ...

Or just go with the ultra-cheap YongNuo RF-602, which give you a lot of bang for the buck. I own two sets and find them good enough for serious work. Before I owned a set of Cactus V2 Trigger (one sender, two receivers), and these gave me a lot of problems: Sometimes they did not trigger the flash. Sometimes they triggered the flash without me taking a ...

I can't say for sure, but my spontaneous guess would be a tradeoff between portability and quality. The fresnel lens takes less space and weighs less than a traditional lens, so it's more practical in the case of a hotshoe flash. On the other hand the fresnel lens typically has a lower image quality than traditional lenses. Perhaps this affects also the ...

No. You shouldn't have any problems, because color temperature of flash units is equal to the daylight color temperature (or you are using low-quality flash unit). What you should avoid is mixing daylight (or flash light) and tungsten light sources. They have different color temperature. Balancing white for daylight (flash light) will make tungsten light ...

It depends on mode. Here are the basics: In manual mode, narrowing the aperture will absolutely reduce the amount of light hitting the sensor as long as you are at sync speed or below. Naturally, the lower the speed, the more the ambient light factors into the equation, which clouds the issue a bit. In TTL mode, narrowing the aperture will cause the flash ...

There is another common division, you list hot lights and strobes. But there are at least two major types of strobes: Studio strobes (typically powered by battery packs or mains) and speedlights (small battery powered strobes). There are many professional photographers who use and prefer speedlights (David Hobby, Joe McNally, Syl Arena). Check out their ...

I'm assuiming you mean things like headshots, fashion, and nudes when you say 'modelling' so with a budget of 850 dollars you won't be able to afford a camera and lights ideal for that. However there are many techniques you can learn to save on expensive equipment. Ordinary house windows make excellent lighting sources that offer a flattering sideways light ...

It depends what you want to do. If you never envision yourself using TTL control, then just about anything will do (though you might find the YN462 to be way underpowered compared to the other units in the lineup). For the sake of versatility, you might want to stick to the higher-powered units (either "mark" of the YN560) just to make sure you have power ...

If you don't mind spending a few dollars before the event, there are a couple of options that will help take your flash up off the lens axis and make the source bigger: Gary Fong Light Spheres Honl Speed Snoot which can be configured for bounce. If you don't want to really spend money, the second option can be made pretty cheaply with foamies (specialty ...

Adding another identical flash will double the amount of light the flashes give, this in turn will double the amount of light hitting you subject (compared to the exact same setup with just one flash)- but it will not double the range or guide number of the flash (as everyone else said you need 4 flashes for that)

Yes, adding strobes does add to flash power, but you'll encounter the inverse square law - doubling flash power only increases distance that can be lit by 1.41 times. Three flashes will illuminate 1.73 times further than one (1.22 times further than two). To double the distance, you'll need to quadruple flash power - and it's only 1.15 times further than you ...

Yes, it is true, as long as we are speaking of the same distance between flashes and subject. The answer to the question about diminishing returns depends on what do you want from the quality of light, as opposed to the quantity of light. For example, two speedlights put next to each other tend to result in a nasty double shadow and so on. With today's ...

That system, if real, represents a metric craptonne of bang for the buck. We're talking about "sounds too good to be true" territory -- not that it is too good to be true, necessarily, but there's some grain-of-salt stuff to go over. The first thing to notice is that the lights are rated at "250W". That's 250 Watts. The guide numbers they state (45 in feet ...

Not knowing what you are looking at doing, all I can do is refer you to this article: http://www.digital-slr-guide.com/studio-strobes.html I'm thinking, based on the information in that article, that you'll want the larger 250W strobes.

I started using strobes about a year ago. I have 2 Vivitar 285s, 2 cheap "cactus" remotes, 2 cheap stands and 2 cheap shoot-through umbrellas. (all available from Amazon). It came to under GBP 200. I've been very happy with this setup, and I think I've done some nice work with it an example is here.

I'm by no mean an expert, but I just bought my first strobes a few months ago. I got a kit from Elinkrom : the D-Lite 4. The kit comes with 2 strobes, 2 stands, 2 softboxes, a remote trigger, a PC cable and a DVD with a short tutorial to get you started. This is all you need to start. The kit was about 900CHF (about 930USD). I find it a good value for my ...