I’ve been experimenting with lighting. Natural light photography is great and beautiful and I love it but I wanted to see if I could control the situation. Also, I want to try a continuous lighting setup. No flash for me! With the advent of LED and CFL lighting why would anyone want to mess with flash when you could do a light set up and actually see what the picture will look like in the room? Plus LED and CFL lights are cool, meaning they don’t get hot. They use less energy and give off a ton of light.
A while ago I bought a set of IKAN LED lights. One big one and two small ones. They are great – especially the small ones because they run on rechargeable batteries. Both have a dial where you can adjust the color temperature and they’re dimmable. I also have two other very small LED lights – a GisteQ that dims and a super inexpensive one that doesn’t. Still great.
I then tried a CFL set with umbrellas but the set was so cheaply made it didn’t even work when I pulled it out of the box. So I tried the Genaray SectroLED-9 lights. They’re great but I wanted to bounce them off umbrellas and they might be too big…or I need bigger umbrellas. Or I might scrap the umbrella idea and put them in softboxes. The only thing I don’t like about them is they do not run on batteries so I have to run extension cords, etc.
I also got a ring light. I have an LED and a CFL. The Stellar 18″ CFL goes on a stand and you shoot through it. Pretty cool but you can’t move around. The LED goes on camera so you can move around but it’s pretty heavy so it does not work with my 50mm 1.4 lens.
SO my lighting setup. Rim lights: 2 IKANs behind the subject on either side. One of the small LED lights on a stand lighting the background. One adjustable LED overhead. Two Genaray’s bounced into umbrellas on either side of the camera, facing the subject. Ring light in the middle. That should be 7 lights. Very bright!
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