Secrets About Lighting Gear
Lessons On What You Really Need
Ninety-nine percent of anything I remotely regard as a personal project serves one purpose — to let me have fun making personal projects. I love photography but doing it as a job day in and day out can lead down the path of loosing the joy. Part of that is the way I am wired as well. Let’s just say my inner self goes absolutely berserk in taking things way too far and slight obstacle in my way insights inner rage that’s really hard to put into words. Hence personal projects that for the most part is me, my camera, a collaborator, and let the chips fall where they may. In many ways it’s about me giving up control. That serves me and the way my gears grind very well as it bleeds over to my professional work in a very good way.
What does that have to do with lighting or for that matter lighting gear? Well, just about everything in a way. As photographers we depend on gear and one way or another we’re all gear junkies but possibly in different ways. Give the above intro, my particular gear obsession is that stuff get the hell out of my way so I’m constantly in search of stuff that pisses me of less. On the other hand I’m a minimalist in terms of I much rather less stuff to keep track of, figure out, and decide on. Too bad we all end up with way more stuff than we’d like to solve particular problems with a lot of those being edge cases of various sorts where any particular piece of stuff has nothing to do with 90% of what you do. Too bad that other 90% can turn into a million little different edge cases. You think camera and lens junk is bad, lighting gear is a thousand times that.
Here’s the secret you’ve been waiting for… It’s not the actual lights that are the stars of the show or even remotely where you’ll end up spending a ton of money. It can seem like it when you first buy a couple but they last forever and honestly don’t really factor in as much as you’d think to the total mass of stuff one accumulates or how much gets spent. It’s all the damn modifiers and grip associated with those lights. Here’s the thing, most of all that junk are minor variations intended to work maybe slightly better than something very similar in any given situation. The fact of the matter is that you can buy and own ever “official” light modifier on the planet and changing those out to optimize for any given circumstance is going to get you not a lot farther than a few simple and generic tools that none of the lighting companies sell. In fact you’ll end up needing and using that other stuff, that super simple stuff that lighting companies don’t feel no matter weather you own every modifier ever invented or virtually nothing.
So what is all this cheap secret lighting gear that lighting manufacturers don’t sell? Here’s a partial list:
- Lots of foam-core sheets or whatever equivalent floats your boat. Preferably the kind that’s white on one side and black on the other.
- Gaffer’s tape.
- Lots of clamps of various types, sizes, configurations.
- Cinefoil or whatever particular brand equivalent you like.
Yep, that’s the secret. I swear this stuff is far more useful and necessary than having the entire catalog of crap you hook on to the front of your lights. I Brough this up because I was forced/cajoled into making a few pictures for a fellow photographer that he needed to illustrate some book or promotion or both or something. Honestly I wanted nothing to do with it for a lot of reasons, the biggest being the constrained space I had to work in. No scratch that, I don’t like shooting flat stuff that doesn’t move and is super boring. Well, actually both those things but him + any sort of lighting or indoor shooting = disaster so there I was. I wanted to get this over with as fast as possible and make whatever satisfied him for his needs.
Here’s the thing, I brought a very small travel kit with me and not a ton of specialize modifiers. Three light heads, some simple lightweight stands (don’t think for a second I’d haul around a bunch of steel C-stands with out a crew), and a remote trigger for those light heads. For 80’s of what he needed I ended up using one strobe head with the most underrated modifier of all time (a small shallow white umbrella) and that’s it. I did use the same plus another head and a 30 degree grid for the other 10%. I’ll walk you thru the most boring pictures in the world to give anyone dipping their toe into lighting gear because it just happens to show a good example of what I’m talking about.
The following are all SOOC using my old XT-1 set on ProNeg standard JPEG with 55–200 zoom. Hell I didn’t even do any crops, straitening, or perspective transform. Not bad for an old guy in terms of straitness etc, huh.
Second frame with initial light setup. One Profoto D1 with a 33" white bounce back shallow umbrella (I have a few of these 33" box stock Profoto umbrellas. I think I got them for free from Profoto at some point, no matter I use them more than one would think). You can probably tell it’s off to camera right as high as it can go with the low ceilings in the room we were working in and about 4 or 5 feet away.
Yep we have a significant degree of fall-off from right to left but that’s okay, I really didn’t want completely flat light with zero dimension. Without doing anything else we have reasonably decent fill from the white-ish wall immediately to camera left as well as all the bounce back you are bound to get when shooting against white with everything so close together. The background and bottom are two 4x8 pieces of white gator-board or some knock-off brand jammed together. I rather foam-core myself but that’s for another day, especially when it comes to using it in other ways.
Third frame, first test position of a flag with the other photographer (aka world’s worst lighting assistant) holding it where I asked him to. Here’s what’s going on, it’s a piece of cardboard about 3ft x 3ft that I’m having my make-due assistant block the spill from the umbrella on camera light. It’s placed about even with the print in terms of depth. See what that’s doing to the background?
Fourth frame, wrestling that 3 x 3 hunk of cardboard into place on a makeshift thinking I’m using as grip using a clamp. Based on the frame above I eyeballed where I thought it should actually be vs where world’s worst assistant was holding it. It’s a bit farther in than the first shot and a bit forward. Now you see? I knocked down that side of the background and flagged a hair off the right side of the print in the center.
What’s my point? Sure I could have used a 3ft octa or box with a grid and not had as much spill but I probably would have needed a flag anyway to get the gradient I wanted on the background. I may have even needed a fill light if said box/grid didn’t spill enough onto the opposing wall. The truth is you have more control with independent flags than you do with shit connected to the modifier anyway.
Sure, all those lighting modifiers in the catalog are about making bigger or smaller relative light sources but they are also about shape and shape is all about keeping light off stuff. I swear you’ll spend more time after you figure out how your stuff works keeping light off stuff than you will putting it on. Her’s the truth, want to know what I really wanted and was missing in terms of gear? First of all I’d much rather black foam-core (or white or the black side of black/white) as a flag. See the reddish warmth in that upper right corner? Most likely that’s from the brown cardboard. What else? Something remotely like a C-stand and a way better clamp to hold the flag so that I could position it way more precisely and adjust the angle of it etc. the only thing I could do with the make shift right was hold it strait up and down and move it in and out without the whole thing falling apart. Oh and yea, white foam-core instead of whatever brand/type of gator board that we used as a set. Why? Whatever that stuff was has way way too much optical brightener in it which is why it looks blue.
Here’s some bottom line advice for getting your lighting gear situated.
- Get the best strobes you can afford, make them all the same if you can. If they all work the same and all have the same controls and mounts your life will be far far easier. They’ll last virtually forever so it’s kind of a one-time thing. I happen to like Profoto stuff for all sorts of reasons if you average everything out but I’ll go into that some other day.
- Get some reasonable sized soft light modifiers that are versatile to make soft light. Don’t spend a shit ton of money on these, umbrellas are fine and have a ton of advantages. Don’t go way way too big unless you have a giant space you’ll always be working on. You can see what a 33" looks like at 5-ish feet with some fill. I typically use something bigger but rarely use anything over 4 or 5 feet in diameter even though I have a lot of stuff bigger than that. Truth is you can make all sorts of soft light with a couple of pieces of foam-core. You can also make amazing light with silks/scrims as well which are way better if you need really really big light sources anyway. All of this is super cheap compared to the 9 billion octaboxes/softboxes/etc.
- Invest in grip. Specifically steel C-stands (which are very reasonably priced) if you don’t have to travel with them yourself. Buy more of these than you need as if you have a bunch of grip, foam-core, and clamps/tape you are golden.
- Get yourself a few hard light modifiers and some grids. Anything you can use to narrow light down and keep it off stuff is great. A couple of grids can do wonders. Don’t go crazy as that’s what the cine-foil is for, making light shapers that flag the light off at the source.
All things being equal I’d grab the above and and extra head more than I would go berserk on spending a shit ton of money on 82 different modifiers. Sure, you’ll acquire these too, I have more crap than I could even inventory of the top of my head. You’ll even have your favorite go-to things that are not any of the stuff I just listed. Here’s the think With the stuff I just listed you’ll be far far far better prepared to know exactly what would actually help you and why. Trust me, you’ll need that simple stuff anyway.
