Photo Lighting
What is a good brand for photo studio lighting kit?
I want to build a photo studio at home. The problem is, I know nothing about a good brand for lighting kit. Plus, my friend told me to be a little more careful on buying lighting equipment since there's a lot of bad lighting kits out there. So, does anyone knows a good brand for it?
(PS: My camera is Nikon D40, if that helps)
I can't afford too expensive one. $1000 is enough, I guess. Thank you.
If you're in the US, Paul C Buff's Alien Bees are pretty good. Bowens are a common industry make. In the UK you've got Elinchrom, Calumet & Interfit which do basic 2 light kits for a reasonable amount (eg and Interfit 'kit' is around £230 from Jessops). They come in different power outputs - the cheaper Interfit kit is 150 W/s - Alien Bees go from 400 W/s and up. Calumet's Genesis system starts at 400 W/s too. Top of the range is Profoto.
These are all fine for most studio work (they're all mains powered). Some like the Alien Bees & the Genesis kits can also be used outdoors using portable battery packs, but these are expensive (sometimes more than the lights themselves). The mount for the modifiers you'll need (softboxes, barn doors, snoots, etc) can vary too - getting something that is compatible with the standard Bowens S mount is good (Alien Bees don't have this mount but the others do. You can buy an adapter which converts the Balcar mount of AB's to the Bowens S mount.
You have a great camera there btw - with an electronic shutter it'll sync at far higher speeds than most other DSLR's which are limited to a 1/200 or 1/250 sync speed.
Also consider the speedlight route for off camera lighting. Although speedlights are much lower power than monoblocs (the studio lights mentioned above) at around 60W/s they have the advantage of being cheap and portable. Outdoor location shooting becomes much easier with these.
A cheap, manually adjustable flash, popular with Strobists is the Yongnuo 460-II at around £40. You can use RF-602 radio triggers to fire these (and studio flashes too) from your D40.
Have a look at the Strobist blog - loads there about off camera lighting, mostly geared to portable speedlights, but its all good info;
http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/02/welcome-to-strobist.html
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