ROTOLIGHT RL48 Portable light for portraits

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Hi all. Looking for a solution. I am going to be doing some newborn photos soon. Not in a studio set up but just some in the home environment. I'm worrying slightly as the house has very small windows and limited natural light. I don't want to use my flash photographing a newborn but think I will struggle getting sharp images even using a high iso.

I want to get some kind of continuous lighting but nothing too intrusive as I'm going to be in someone's home and I don't want to spend ages setting something up. Something portable would be good as I'll be using different rooms. The rotolight rl48 looks like a pretty good option and within my budget. Has anyone used this for portraits mainly newborn? It doesn't appear to have a dim function so worrying it could be light for a baby!
 
I think that you should ditch your aversion to flash and go down that route. There's no evidence to show that flash is detremental to babies' eyesight and it's far quicker than a continuous source to achieve the same exposure.
Think how powerful a flash needs to be to overpower sunlight but you wouldn't think twice about taking a baby out on a sunny day.

Bob
 
Thanks Bob. I'm not too worried about the eyesight... More disrupting a sleepy baby with the odd powerful flash of light. So was thinking something continuous would work better?
 
Thanks Bob. I'm not too worried about the eyesight... More disrupting a sleepy baby with the odd powerful flash of light. So was thinking something continuous would work better?
There’s not much danger of that with a newborn. In fact continuous must logically be worse, would you rather someone shone a very bright torch in your face or fired a few pops of flash.
There’s a reason 99% of pro photographers choose flash over continuous.
 
As per the previous two replies, they are right and sadly you are not.
Flash is so fast that it's over before a baby can react to it, continuous lighting -even the Rotalight - is blindingly bright.

And, if you choose to ignore this advice then don't buy seriously overpriced junk about which deceptive and misleading marketing videos are made - IMO just about every other continuous light is less bad than this one.
 
Thanks again everyone. The only reason I was going to avoid using my flash is because I know 3 professional newborn photographers who never use them. They are studio photographers who unfortunately can't give me any advice on portable lighting from experience. I would prefer to use natural light if I can so hoping it's not a dreary day. Looks like I should avoid the rotolight anyway!
 
Thanks again everyone. The only reason I was going to avoid using my flash is because I know 3 professional newborn photographers who never use them. They are studio photographers who unfortunately can't give me any advice on portable lighting from experience. I would prefer to use natural light if I can so hoping it's not a dreary day. Looks like I should avoid the rotolight anyway!
All the newborn photographers I know use flash, last twice I did it I used window light simply because the house had huge patio windows that were perfect.

That said, lighting shouldn’t be about choosing technology for the sake of it.

It ought to be:
Is the natural light any good for what I want to deliver?
If not can it be helped with reflectors?
If not what’s the easiest alternative I can control?
If that’s flash, use flash.
At the end of the day, you don’t want to produce crap pictures because you chose a light source for the wrong reason.
 
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