Best Business Practices for Photographers [18]
Typically, the prosumer lines of camera and lighting equipment have fewer features than the professional line and more features than the consumer line. Further, in many lines, especially in the areas of camera chips and lenses, the purest chips that render within higher tolerances are given to the professional cameras, and the chips that fall out of that tolerance end up in the prosumer or consumer bodies, with the software then dumbed down to limit the functionality of the chip. There are several times when this has occurred. One time in particular was several years back, with Canon EOS Rebel bodies carrying the same chip as prosumer models. There was a great deal of discussion surrounding just how to effect a change in the software to "upgrade" your EOS Rebel to have the functions of its more expensive sibling.
When you're on assignment is not the time to find that you have a need that exceeds your equipment's capabilities, from chip size, to f-stops, to flash duration, to incremental flash settings to a tenth of an f-stop, and so on. If this occurs, you will find yourself making compromises on the quality of your imagery and what you produce creatively for the client.
Pro-Line versus Prosumer-Line Lighting: Why Spend the Money?
I'll be the first to admit that I started with Dynalites 15 years ago. Soon, I got tired of trying to put lights in disparate locations, even with extension cords for the heads. I never had enough extension cords, packs, or f-stop adjustment abilities. As a result, I upgraded to Paul C. Buff's White Lightning line of monobloc heads. I relied on the White Lightnings for a number of years and held the Dynalites in reserve as my backup lighting kit or for use when I had a larger shoot that called for additional lighting. One day, I found myself doing a number of portraits on location, and one room in particular just couldn't be lit the way I wanted it—the White Lightnings just were not powerful enough, so I began to explore my options. I looked at a number of professional-grade lines and settled on Hensels. I liked a number of their features. I'm not saying they are the brand to go with, but they are the kind of high-quality gear I strongly recommend. There are numerous reasons to go with pro-level lighting, not the least of which is durability.
Professional-grade lighting has two significant features that are often lost among the less detail-oriented—color temperature shift and flash duration.
Color temperature shift is what it sounds like—the change from 5500°K to, say, 4800°K over the range from full power to 1/4 power. Although technology has advanced over the years to the extent that color shift over lighting power ranges has diminished, there are still a limited number of definitive situations in which this will have an effect. Here are a few:
Food photography (especially chocolate)
Product photography (consider client logos and Pantone colors)
Scientific photography
In addition, a change of even 100°K is a perceptible change in color temperature when two images are placed next to each other with varying temperatures of that small a shift. Further, a shift of 700°K is between a 1/4 and 1/8 CTO and can make your subjects warmer than you expected. Although this shift might have presented a much more significant concern in the days of film, it is still important to know that you are shifting color temperatures when adjusting power on prosumer lines of equipment. This will also explain why your whites are not a pure white, but a warm white when a subject is photographed on a white seamless.
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NOTE
CTO is the orange gel that converts daylight to tungsten. A full CTO gel converts 5500°K light to 3200°K, and 1/2 and 1/4 gels are relative reductions in that shift.
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The major issue that affects prosumer lighting is flash duration, and it's still a problem with digital cameras. If you've ever seen