Brand suggestions

Hi there,

Recently I have decided to get into food/still life photography and I would like to ask for some simple suggestions.

What would be the best professional brands/websites for lighting and studio photography accessories that you would suggest to someone?

Thank you kindly.

Daniele

This isn't any easy question to answer . . .

When it comes to the actual flash heads, my own preference would be
1. Bron
2. Profoto
3. Godox
4. Elinchrom

With Bron being way ahead of any of the others, but with a massive price premium. And that price premium also applies to the accessories, which in my view are at least as important (probably much more important) than the flash heads. There are a limited number of light shapers actually made by either Bron or Profoto, other manufacturers supply adapters to fit them but they aren't always great.

When it comes to flash heads, all that really matters is consistency - that's consistency in both the quantity of light (flash energy) and the quality of light (colour temperature, which is why I would rule out most makes not on my list.

Lencarta (among others) sell Godox equipment, they also have a fairly wide range of tutorials on product photography, which you'll find in their Learning Centre.

You'll find loads of tutorials on YouTube, I haven't looked at any of the ones sponsored by Profoto for a long time - things may have changed but in the past their tutorials seemed to me to be nothing more than advertorials and it is obvious to experienced studio photographers that the results shown often weren't even produced by the featured equipment.

Still life photography (including food) is a very specialist subject, but fortunately there are quite a few of us on this forum who know about it, so please ask specific questions. It would help us to know a bit about your own approach though - for example if you're going to use a monorail camera then the answers will be very different to if you're going to use a small(ish) digital camera, and if you have a large budget then the answers will be different than those for a small budget.

Thank you Garry, you have been really helpful!

Not much to add to @Garry Edwards post...

the other recommendation for a Godox rebrand is Essential Photo.

with modern digital cameras you don’t need massive amounts of power in a studio, so don’t waste money on heads that you could spend on bits of wire, odds and ends of clamps, cinefoil, reflectors, grids etc.
On the above, a studio full of bits of crap like that is more useful than one containing 3 great heads on stands.

and if you’re new to this, you probably need 3x as much space as you imagine.

Phil V said:

Not much to add to @Garry Edwards
On the above, a studio full of bits of crap like that is more useful than one containing 3 great heads on stands.
.

Click to expand...

My studio is high in crap

Amazing the stuff you use. I recently bought syringe needles in various bores and lengths: water droplets for the precise placing of. In the past, as well as the Cinefoil, grids, and reflectors I've also bought: various sizes of syringe for placing and extraction of water. Family pack of air-dusters, pure isopropanol (pure flame fuel with no residue, and cleaning), pure acetone (removing welded on gel from flash tubes ), a litre of glycerine (mix with water to make drops stick), 200ml of fractioned coconut oil (makes skin shiny), bingo-clips (croc clips on a wire embedded in a block resin for holding small things). A small pocket blow torch (matches and lighters tend to get blown out by an assault of isopropanol spray), a CO2 fire extinguisher and fire blanket. wire lights, super-clamps, pole clamps, A-clamps, grip-heads, extension arms, boom arms, magic arms, foam board in black, grey and white in various sizes, freezer blocks (chills fog in collapsible aluminium ducting pipe), floor drier (wind machine) various DJ laser show devices, slabs of acrylic in black, white , colours in various sizes (used mainly as reflective bases for products). Blu-tak - mainly used to make water dams on the acrylic slabs. Projectors, costume jewellry, prisms and other random chunks of geometric glass, glass balls, Fresnel lenses (from Rymans' - £5 bargain) and a kids blow-up paddling pool (I build the water sets in this and it catches the run-off).

So I'd have to say most of my stuff comes from eBay, Amazon and Wish, but my lights are mostly from Lencarta