Lighting gear is one of the essential pieces of equipment for a photographer. A lighting gear helps in adding more value and beauty to the captured images.
Having lighting gear provides you with room for creativity and imagination. You can play with different light effects in your photography. You can add glow, dim light, and even add sparkle to your images. Light has more use in case you are hunting, in that you can read our guide on budget camera for filming hunts
Thus, having efficient lighting gear can help in your photography career. But how to choose the best lighting for photography.
Some of the best lighting for photography is as follows:
Best Lighting For Photography
Studio Lights
Studio-based photographers prefer studio lights for the majority of photoshoots they do. Studio lights are comparatively bulky than portable lighting gear.
Studio lights provide consistent lighting during the photoshoot. Thus, you can continue to shoot without any hurdles. If you are a beginner with photography, studio lights can help produce high-quality images.
Along with images, studio lights are also ideal for shooting continuous videos.
Strobe lights
Strobe lights are brighter lights emitting light on the camera’s flash. Strobe lights produce a short burst of light. The high power output and quick recycle time make the strobe lights preferable among other kinds of lighting.
Strobe lights can fit into a variety of photography styles. The high light power of strobe light helps in lighting objects kept at a distance from the camera.
You can even use diffusers with strobe lights. It helps in adding feathered lighting or soft lighting effects to your photographs. Also, with strobe lights, you can achieve a particular lighting effect. You can even avoid the sunlight effect in your captures.
The flash time of strobe lights makes it ideal for high-speed photography.
Speed lights
Speed lights help produce a faster flashlight than the flashlight present in cameras. Photographers combine the speed lights with softboxes and umbrellas.
Speed lights are also known as hot shoe flashes. Thus, don’t get confused if you see this name instead of speed lights.
They are very lightweight. You can easily carry speed lights to different photography locations.
It can become an efficient lighting gear with DSLR cameras. Thus, pairing them with the appropriate camera devices can help you produce high-quality images.
Also, speedlights are much more affordable than strobe lights. Their versatility makes them ideal for different styles of photoshoots.
Continuous Lights
Continuous lights, as the name suggests, provide continuous light. It doesn’t get on and off like the strobe lighting. It helps you visualize the final photography even when you have finalized the complete photography setup.
You can set up continuous lights using basic lighting fixtures to advanced professional lighting setup. Continuous lights are an effective and cheap way of providing consistent lighting for the photo shoot.
One of the effective sources of continuous lights is energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs.
These bulbs produce less heat and are cost-effective than other bulbs. For much superior power, you can choose Tungsten bulbs. For continuous lights, you also need mounting or light stands.
Light stands or mounting helps to arrange the continuous lights appropriately in the room. Using the light stands can have the lights at different angles and heights. It provides you with room for experimenting and creativity.
One of the most common and effective stand lights is C-Stand. They are durable, affordable, and ideal for shooting indoors with continuous lights.
Conclusion
Lighting can help you enhance your images and captures. With different lighting, you can add light effects to your photographs. You can add the feathered lighting effect, soft lighting effect, and many others.
There are a variety of lights available for photography. Studio lights, strobe lights, and continuous lights are some of them.
You can combine the lights with modifiers and light stands for adding more effects to your captures.
