Guide me.....

neo2810

neo2810

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You need to buy a studio flash system. You have a £2k budget. The lights will be used solely for the purpose of shooting football team and individual player photos against a 3.6m white backdrop. You want minimal post pro so ideally want the backdrop blown out in shot.

What do you buy and how do you set it up?

Hit me....
 
Yeah, big long arctic white paper backdrop on 4m support which will encompass all the players. Shooting distance from subjects can be anything from 3m - 10m. Will be shooting with a Canon 24-105L.
I'm leaning towards 4x Bowen 500G's or 4x Elinchrome BXR600's but wondering if there's a benefit to getting 2x 400's and 2x 800's to ensure blowout of the back with the extra stop while keeping 400W to light the subjects.
Lencarta not out of the question but I'm more familiar with Elin and Bowens so probably leaning that way.
 
In a studio or on location?

If it's not in your own studio, then I'd be tempted to go for a portable solution with probably 3 or 4 Lencarta Atom 360s/Calumet Genesis GF400/Godox Witstro AD360s with appropriate mods and a BG system. That'll easily fit within budget.
 
The shoot will be in a large hall, and all the kit will be stored there as well so it's effectively a studio setting. The BG system already exists, so all I need are the lights, stands, mods and trigger.
 
Right, here we go.

I'm currently looking at:

2x Bowens Gemini 500R twin kits (incl Pulsar TX) - £1900 (4x 500W lights, 2x brollys, 2x softboxes, triggers) and maybe a 100x100 Profold softbox or 2 for better light spread

OR

2x Elinchrome BXR 500/500 twin kits - £1920 (Used to own BXRi500's and they were awesome)

OR

2x Lencarta ElitePro 2 1200W Kits - £1250 (and then a shed load of big softboxes/umbrellas and modifiers)

Now I don't really need all the mods so the fact that I can buy tons of addons because the Lencarta lights are cheaper is not incentive. These lights could effectively be used once a year purely for the football shoot in which case most of the extras are pointless. I'd rather spend the whole £2k budget (with a stretch budget if necessary to get more power) on better lights that will make that shoot easier. I'm not sure there will be any impact shooting at 600W/300W over shooting 500W/250W (background/subject lights) so the 3 options are comparible in addressing the brief.

What would you do? (or should I be looking at 750W/1000W options instead because 250W isn't enough for a large group portrait?)
 
How much ambient/artificial lighting is available? How far are the walls/ceilings?

You're going to have a hard time lighting a team AND a large BG with 4 lights IMO... I probably wouldn't even worry about modifiers except for the individual shots. You're going to need to back those lights up to minimize falloff or bounce them off of something pretty large... both require more power. If it's a large space in every aspect, you probably need to be looking at 800ws+.
BUT, a new design digital 600ws can be as powerful as an old design 1200ws strobe... plus the reflector and where/how you point it makes a difference as well. I'm not very knowledgeable of all of the various models available so I can't be much help with that.

It might be doable with 4 lights assuming you have some other things to work with (i.e. artificial light you can gel to match). The other side of this is high power strobes aren't going to be the best choice for up close individual portraits... If you have to move a larger modifier further away due to too much output it might as well be a smaller one on a lower power head. I would probably be looking for a mix of high/low depending on what else you have to work with and the priorities.

*** there are some heads that have "stepless variable adjustment" I don't know if that means they can be dialed down to near zero (as opposed to 1/128th)... but if it does, high power heads with that feature could be your best bet (color temp tends to shift w/ power though).
 
2 lights on the background will be an absolute minimum here, with a large background, and all of it used, it would make much more sense to have 4 lights on the background, it will light it more evenly and reduce/remove the need for PP.

And it will have the added benefit of redundancy - if a flash head fails for any reason then, effectively, you will have a spare. You don't need fancy, expensive modifiers to light the background, you just need white reflective umbrellas, see here

For your large group shots, again a couple of white reflective umbrellas is all that you need, there will be no advantage in having softboxes for this, it isn't in any event a situation in which you can light creatively.
For individual shots, just a softbox and an umbrella, simple.

And you won't need a lot of power either, the days of needing very powerful flash heads pretty well died with the introduction of digital cameras that can be used at higher than 100 ISO - if you ever need more power, just turn the ISO up a bit. The Lencarta ElitePro 600 has a guide number of 230 (ft), fitted with a standard reflector - this means f/23 at a distance of 10' at 100 ISO... I don't know the Elinchrom figures but they will be similar.

So, 3 x Lencarta ElitePro 1200Ws kits + 1 softbox, or the equivalent in another make, job done.
 
Thanks guys.

Garry, I reckon you're spot on. 4 lights on the background and 2 on subjects should be ideal. I assume you would set the back lights high/low on either side to get even coverage?

3x Lencarta 1200W is what I'm going to plumb for. The bonus is it's not my money so I can afford to take a risk or 2 I wouldn't myself :p
 
neo2810 said:
Thanks guys.

Garry, I reckon you're spot on. 4 lights on the background and 2 on subjects should be ideal. I assume you would set the back lights high/low on either side to get even coverage?

3x Lencarta 1200W is what I'm going to plumb for. The bonus is it's not my money so I can afford to take a risk or 2 I wouldn't myself :p
Click to expand...
Yes, you'll need to experiment with positioning but basically it's high/low, with the lights on the right pointing towards the left side of the background and vice versa.
 
Thanks Garry, just ordered the kit. I've gone for the 100cm square softbox to use as my main portrait mod and will use one of the brollys for fill. Should be very quick and easy to switch mods between group and individual shots.
Can you just confirm that I can control all 6 lights (with commander receivers fitted) from a single commander transmitter? I realise I'm going to receive 3 transmitters within the packs but assume you can configure 1 of them to control all 6 lights and keep 2 spare?
 
neo2810 said:
Thanks Garry, just ordered the kit. I've gone for the 100cm square softbox to use as my main portrait mod and will use one of the brollys for fill. Should be very quick and easy to switch mods between group and individual shots.
Can you just confirm that I can control all 6 lights (with commander receivers fitted) from a single commander transmitter? I realise I'm going to receive 3 transmitters within the packs but assume you can configure 1 of them to control all 6 lights and keep 2 spare?
Click to expand...
Thanks for that, your order will go tomorrow for delivery on WED.

Yes, there is no real limit to the total number of heads that you can control from one transmitter, there are 15 different channels which means that you can control up to 15 heads individually, having allocated each receiver to a different channel. If you set the same channel to more than one receiver, then the heads on that channel will be adjusted together - useful say if you have more than 1 head lighting a background.
 
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