I have a medium size church room for doing standard wedding photographs and I'm trying to learn how to do the math for lighting. Over 1k of continuous lighting isn't near as bright as my two little Neewer speedlights at full power via a trigger for 1/200s. Basically, strobes put much more light out than continuous lighting for still photos because it's a sub-second burst.
All this has me wondering how to calculate lumens (or something else) that I can use to gauge the amount of light needed to fill certain areas. I read this article from tutsplus network about strobe power calculations but I'm not totally sure I understand how they figured out the 10,000,000 lumens number or where the math came from.
Take a strobe, with its xenon gas discharge tube, which attains somewhere in the region of 300 lumens per watt. Let's use a relatively low-power 60Ws speedlight, and assume the manufacturer isn't fudging the numbers and the electronics are high-efficiency. If we multiply the lm/W by the Ws, we cancel the Watts and end up with lumen-seconds. So the lumen-second output is around 18,000lm-s. Yes, but, remember: all of those lumen-seconds from the strobe are being discharged in around 1/2500 second. So we take the lumen seconds, divide by seconds to leave lumens, and what do we have?
18000/ 1/2500 = 4800*2500 = 45,000,000 lumens! Realistically the output from flashes is more like 10,000,000 lumens, due to optical and electronic inefficiencies, but still. They're all hitting your subject almost instantaneously, allowing you to very briefly overpower the sun, very briefly light up whole rooms or hillsides or waves.
I've tried to understand guide numbers (GN) but they seem to be a different lengths on my lights so I'm not sure how to compare them.