Strobe Photography Lighting in the UK

[ShaunHill]

Hello there, I am looking to invest in some decent lighting equipment (including all the relevant accessories). I found this image which compelled me to a particular line of products but then realised that as with a lot of photography products, these are mainly only available in the US!

http://www.paulcbuff.com/images/ads/e640_silverangel.jpg

Does anyone have any recommendations for UK alternatives and have any idea how much the whole lot would cost (equivalents to the list in the image above)? Just to clarify I would preferably be looking at going portable with battery packs.

It needs enough power to cover a family of approx. 5-6 people at least.

 

[Michael Sewell]

Something like this?

Details here

 

[Garry Edwards]

Yes, Jaroslav does some very nice work, he is a member on this forum.
I thinki it's fair to say that his approach to this type of shot is very similar to that of Alexander Heinrichs.

Basically it involves an excellent model with very good assistants, MUA etc, a very creative approach, painstaking attention to detail and of course excellent Photoshop skills.

In other words, the credit should go to the photographer, not to the equipment. That water isn't moving as fast as you think and you're looking at as much PS as camera work here.

But if you do want a really high speed flash with plenty of power and higher performance than the Alien Bee Einstein, then you may want to look at the Lencarta SuperFlash. It outperforms the AB in all areas, and has customer support too.

The only thing it doesn't currently have is dedicated radio triggers, but they're going to be in stock in a few days.

 

[Garry Edwards]

The OP has sent me a PM asking me why not just use the LED1000 continuous light instead, and also asking about modifiers and prices.

Rather than just answer him, as this question is a good one and may interest other people, it might be best to make the answer available to everyone...

The LED1000 produces the rough equivalent of 1000 Watts of tungsten light. The SuperFast 600 produces 600 Ws of light. This means that at full power, the SF600 produces as much light in something like 1000th second as a continuous light of the same power would produce at a shutter speed of 1 second. Therefore there is a massive difference in effective power, it would be impossible to use the continuous light at a high enough shutter speed to freeze water being thrown at a model.

Modifiers. Impossible to say, it comes down to a lot of factors including personal preference. I tend to go for hard lighting, I'm guessing that I would use a gridded strip softbox each side of the model, and in a rimlight position. I would probably light her face with a gridded beauty dish and use a 150cm octa softbox as an on axis fill, although a shoot through umbrella could also be used for that. But I never actually know how I'm going to light something until I start doing it, so that could end up being a wrong guess.

Actually we're doing something broadly similar with the SuperFast lights this week. I'm sure that there will be a blog post about it in the future.

Using honeycombed lights more or less dictates that each light has its own radio receiver, the radio triggers are arriving in a few days, I think that the receivers are going to cost less than £40 each, so 3 of those and one transmitter/receiver set at about £70 to add to the mix.

If Jaroslav sees this thread he may want to share his own techniques.

Edit: The advert shows that Jaroslav used a strip softbox as rimlight left and another as key light right.

 

[HoppyUK]

There are lots of threads on getting started with studio equipment Shaun. Just scroll down a bit.

Decent quality kit starts from about £200 for a single flash head set-up, and can easily run to thousands, but less is usually more with lighting, certainly if you're new to it, but if you start right, you can build from there and progress in any direction you like. If you particularly want very short flash durations, that will put the prices up.

Knowledge is key, most flash units flash just the same within reason, it's what you do with the light and the modifiers used that makes the difference. You could easily spend as much on modifiers as on the heads themselves.

Edit: Lencarta great value; Elinchrom good quality and big range; Profoto very nice There are loads of other brands, many of them good, but none beats those three in their respective price ranges.