Ok I've heard that from several people. But am still needing a
little help on what I do need to buy.
On your first post you said you would do babies to family groups, in a studio, on location, in other words everything anywhere. Someone else gave what is great advice, buy one good head and a stand and reflector and learn with that and you'll know about what to get from there.
Most mid range strobes are like other consumer goods, highly competitive with incremental differences between this or that brand and model, and like stereos, cars, computers, guys can argue around and around forever about what is better or sucks worse. What do your friends use? having neighbors, friends, or a camera store with a rental department means you can borrow additionsal stuff and accessories or rent them.
Where to buy
craigslist.org every year a couple hundred decide to become photogs and every year most of them give up or go broke, CL will have a lot of classified ads for studio stuff, you can check them out before you buy, something you can't do on ebay, my other choice. and often when you buy from a closing studio you get a bunch of other accessories and stuff included, something that rarely happens on ebay cause those dealers often buy that same stuff and part it all out. BandH B&H is a major internet/mail order dealer with a decent rep, check out anyother dealer on resellerratings.com
soft boxes and umbrellas? sizes of stands?
stands? 13 foot get at least one pneumatic as your main stand, one that you will probably adjust the most so you don't have your prized monohead come crashing down. how many? depending on how you hang your background, none, one or two, a main light, a fill (get a boom arm, or use several heads to bounce off the backwall for a fill system) a hair/effects light (again another boom arm)
softboxes/brollies? larger is usually better, how tall is your ceiling? see if you can find an "Ed Pierce" Westcott Halo since you will be doing portable work, it opens like an umbrella but is a softbox 30x40 which is small by my way of thinking but still fast and easy to use.
you can spend a fortune on softboxes, but I've suggested this a half dozen times today, the rule of thumb that commercial photogs go by is that the light source is 2x the size of the subject 1x in distance from it. which suggests a really really big softbox, or you can go to a fabric store and buy enough sports nylon ripstop etc to make a curtain from near your background to close to the camera position and put your flash behind it and bounce it off the side wall, now you have a really really big softbox, aka northlight wall. and the space in the middle can be a changing room for the models. This wall of light concept is very cool and fine art oriented, very forgiving, you won't be doing much 'corrective' lighting but then you won't be harming them visually either, and the best thing, seriously, 99.44% of all photogs use the same old highly specular lights that kiddie pix studios, shopping mall studios, church directory studios, passport and ID studios, some are better than others but most all photogs do this, except a small number that have a huge northlight system, and nearly everyone ranks among the best photogs in teh country, among the highest paid. check out Darton Drake who btw is a spokesman or sponsored by Larson below.
And Starfish are made by Larson Enterprises, I guess they are the
same as an octagon box.
slightly different, the starfish bulges out, I believe the octagon is flat like a chimera type softbox, again, either bounce the flash off a white wall or use a halo, cheaper and faster
High key as well as low key lighting. I don't want to be stuck only
doing lowkey shots.
for those who use a fill based exposure system, (I think they are really old fashioned based on the black/white expose for the shadows, develop for the highlight method) can build a high key set on one side, bounce four heads around to make a smooth even white wall, this wall makes a fine fill light for the low key side.
wireless systems or how to set everything up on slave?
some cameras and flash systems have wireless built in, others get pocket wizards or others, well worth it but an investment. those cheap things they sell on ebay will work well enough in the studio.
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Selina Davis Photography
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moderator of the z-prophoto for professional portrait/wedding photogs and the photohistory list for academic research, mailing lists hosted at yahoogroups.com
