One of the best sources of light is strobe. Strobe is better to use than daylight because yu have much more control. Not only can you control the power of the strobe you can manipulate the character of the light. A professional strobe actually has very few controls. Strobe power output, model light output, on/off for the model light, on off for the internal slave and power, and not every strobe has all of these. The most important control is strobe power output; on some strobes this is the only control! Not only is it the most important control; strobe power is the most important factor in what strobe to buy.

One of the biggest reasons that power is important is the need to diffuse the light from the strobe in order to make the strobe act as a large light source. This enables you to create smooth light with diffused highlights that has a smooth long transition into shadow.

Strobe light is created when a spark jumps through a tube of Xenon gas. This is the reason that the light has such a short duration, about 1/1000th of a second, but sometimes as shot as 1/50000th of a second. This means that you do not need to use a tripod to shoot people with strobes, even if you are a little shaky. Another wonderful characteristic of strobe is that they are the same colour as average daylight. This makes it easy to use strobes to fill in a daylight image or to match an indoor shot to the window light.

Both Strobes and daylight and tungsten bulb have a continuous spectrum. This means that if you put the light from any of these sources through a prism to create a rainbow there are not black areas where the light drops out. Many other man made lights have this problem. This can cause colours to reproduce inaccurately even when the light looks useable.

Daylight has the tremendous advantage of being readily available and free. It is easy to see daylight; you don’t need to previsualize it as you do with strobes. Day light is hard to control, it often take 12 hours to move the light source to the other side of the set. But iif you are in the right place at the right time daylight is awesome. I really like mixing daylight with strobe out doors to create a softer light that still sparkles. Flash fill is a wonderful way to take pictures.

Tungsten lights, first a definition, tungsten lights have a filament and the filament is inside a bulb; the light bulbs in your house are tungsten lights. When these bulbs were made specifically for still and movie use they were made to run at very high temperatures so there would be more blue in the light and so the light would be brighter.

If you make a light to run that hot in a regular style bulb it will start to change colour in just a few hours and fail very quickly. There are household style bulbs available for photography. They fit in fixtures by Smith-Victor and other companies. These are very inexpensive and they can be good tools for learning how light works, but since they do not have stable colour they are not great for professional usage because their colour shifts.

Then, there are also quartz bulbs, which are more useful!

Then, there are also quartz bulbs, which are more useful!. These bulbs have stable colour for as much as 60 hours. Because you could run exposures of more than a minute with film and you didn’t have to light the whole shot at the same time there were many creative things you could do. Ideal for the good old days of shooting on film

Although you can’t work in the same way with a digital camera, you can do some great still life shots. The key is to remove any other light source so it won’t pollute your colour. Another thing you want to consider is that these lights produce a great deal of heat, so they are easier to use in winter than summer. You also want to be careful handling these lights; they really get hot. In addition to light stands and other support equipment, don’t forget the tripod. You exposures will often be longer than 1/30th of a second, too long to hand hold.

These lights aren’t as useful as professional strobes, but they are considerably cheaper. They have one big advantage, since you can see the light you’re photographing; it is easier to learn to light with them. You might want to look at lights from Lowel and Smith-Victor.

Sometimes you may find that you will have to work with fluorescent light. There are at least three reasons why fluorescents are particularly difficult to deal with.

1) They do not have a continuous spectrum, if you look at the spectrum of a standard light bulb or of the sun the spectrum is a very smooth colour gradation from red to blue, as I mentioned above. If you look at the spectrum of a fluorescent light there are bright bands that overlay a gradation that is much less smooth that either the light bulb or the sun. This means that even when you filter fluorescents there are some colours that will be too bright and others that will be too dark. It is extremely difficult to use these lights for technical purposes.

2) Fluorescents change their colour over a 1/60 of a second cycle. This is because AC electricity is a wave that is moving the electrons in a wire; this changes the colour of a fluorescent tube over the 1/60th of a second required for a single cycle (this is the U.S., the cycle is different in other countries). The best way to deal with this is to use a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second. This evens out the cycle, multiples of 1/60th of a second will also work, say 1/15th of a second. Goodness I hate writting with fractions.

3) Fluorescent tube change colour over time. Two tubes placed in to the same fixture at the same time may change colour in different ways. I think that cool white are more stable in colour than other tubes, but the problem is not entirely predictable.

Having said all this digital is MUCH better at dealing with this than film was. Digital gets a fair colour balance of these things most of the time, but when you mix them with strobe, which has about the same spectrum as daylight, it is very hard to get everything to balance.