Continuous Lighting Sources for Large Format Photography - Still Life set up

[CC in progress]

Hi, I am capturing images with a 4x5 camera. I want to (eventually) invest in continuous LED lighting for my still-life setups. There are so many options and lighting is an investment. I seek feedback on what has worked for you and your favorite lighting solutions.

For more details, I am working in B&W, capturing my images and developing and printing them at home. I want to improve what I am doing with controlled lighting. I have worked with lighting before, but I no longer have access to these shared resources I did many years ago at university. Help! Please!

If you're willing to share images of your lighting, please do. I am curious to see how others work in their studios.

 

[koraks]

The preference for continuous vs. strobes is personal, but I have to admit that I lean heavily towards the latter. For still photography and especially large format, which usually means low film speed + small aperture, it's nice to have a lot of power and strobes are just very efficient as they only illuminate the scene when it's needed. To match the power of a mid-range set of strobes, you're looking at reasonably big (power-wise) LED heads that run fairly hot - while not half as bad as old-fashioned hot lights, a couple of hundred Watts of RMS power is still a lot of heat.

 

[gary mulder]

In the time I shot film/Polaroids I used a 8000W/s strobes power pack. That is a lot of light.

 

[David Brown]

I concur with your thinking on continuous lighting. Yes, you have low ISO, but you also have a camera presumably on a tripod, so shutter speed (and don't forget reciprocity compensation) can accommodate. All of my studio and still life work over the past several years has been with simple lights. Other than a couple of cheap soft boxes (and I'm trying to get away from them) I've used led lights of all sorts. There are some led's available that are not photo-specific, but affordable and quite powerful. Go to the hardware store and look for "garage" lights or shop lights. Experiment. It can be done.

Just an example: