It's Continuous ......

Most of you who read this Blog regularly will know that I am on the whole not a fan of continuous lighting for studio photography because on the whole the studio flash is so much more effective at creating a quality image, however there are a couple of exceptions that I would like to detail to you here.

The first is a home made light panel and second is the Westcott "Ice Light, the home made light panel I have detailed before in this blog under beauty lighting but as a reminder here it is again :

This panel was designed to give around even lighting for head shots and now uses colour balanced day light lamps to get a better colour temperature, one of the tell tail feature of this panel are the very effective multiple catch lights in the sitters eyes when looking straight on:

The results from this panel never cease to amaze me, I have used it with UV lamps and have now just upgraded it with some newer cool technology 20W day light lamps, equivalent to 100W so with 12 lamps that gives me 1200W overall output of good quality usable light.

The image below is straight out of the camera and the colour temp was deliberately changed to give me this great bluish cast in keeping with the rest of this set of fashion images I was shooting :

Jessica Wilcock Model 

The second type of continuous lighting I want to detail I have really come to love and this is the Ice Light this is a very creative and portable light that has so many application. Think of all those situations where a bit of extra light would have been useful and flash is too much and the soluttion is now available in the shape of the the Ice Light:

Here are some studio images using a couple of Ice Lights and a blue gel background, as you can see below either the model can hold these lights themselves in or out of shot or the photographer can  have totally free creative control to move the lights yourself between shots which is very liberating:

Photographer using one ice light whilst a sect is on a lighting stand to give edge lighting.

The shot captured by the above set up with the photographer having total control of the lighting.

In this image the model holds two Ice Lights for effect.

I am will detailing the Ice Light further in future blogs as I have plans for many varied photoshoots with them over the next couple of weeks, in the interim here are some really cool shots using Ice Lights to do some light painting as part of the same fashion shoot:

Full details on the Ice Light can be seen on the Westcott Website.

Thank you for stopping by and please feel free to put your experiences with these types of lighting in the comments box.
Marc;-)