Studio Strobes VS Continuous Lights

Since the late 70's I've always shot with studio strobes (lights that flashes). With a meter in hand, I would carefully move and measure the lights around the subject before even taking the first shot; subject movement was very limited. Every time we reposition the subject such as sitting, standing, lying down we had to re-measure the lights and adjust the distance.

Average time, in the late 70's, per headshot session was several hours; this did not include the photo development time which is usually a week.


With digital, we could see the photo immediately and we could move the lights freely and adjust the camera as needed; thus eliminating the need for meter. However the need to constantly checking the shot is still a hit and miss process; color balance is a task usually reserved for photoshop.


Recently with the purchase of a continuous light system, all this has changed. Basically setting up the lights is a snap as it is "what you see is what you get". In fact, you can also use the camera WB pre setting to set the exact WB thus no post process color correction is needed.

With aperture priority, auto-iso set to a max of 1600 iso and a 50mm lens, it takes less then 10 minutes to shoot a 150 headshots; all color perfect.

The post processing was a pleasure too as since every photo is already color corrected, the only work that needed to be done in photoshop was re-centering and cropping.

Total time from start to finish took less then half hour.

If you are still using strobes, it is time to change over to continuous; you will thank me for it if you are reading this.