Cheap studio kit on ebay

Depends what you want to achieve, but the lights included are continuous, not strobe, so you wouldn't be able to do flash photography with them, or vary the power of them.

FWIW, I'd leave it well alone but that's just my opinion.
 
I know it's just continues lighting but would be good for a starting point.
 
What do you want to achieve?
Do you understand the significance of the green background?
 
Just want it for portraits and group pictures and my be some dog shots to.
I have used a orange painted wall before with some nice results so was thinking the free would be ok for some practicing. Also was going to buy a white background at a later date.

Must note that I am only looking at this kit to start practicing with, only as a hobby.
 
Lights are useless, spilling everywhere with no control or direction, and brightness will be feeble.
 
Simple answer then. It's rubbish.

Continuous lighting won't give you the exposure values you need for portraiture. You need flash.
 
For what you want to do you really need to think flash deano, there are situations were continuous lighting will work such as mine were I'm shooting in a small room from really close (5ft) and just doing head and shoulders portraits.

Even then I went for a dual light set up that gave me 4 45watt bulbs per 50 xc 70 softbox and the ability to run full or half power on each head.

Yes the quality is nothing to write home about, in fact the stands are pretty dire, but I'm not a burgeoning semi pro just someone who has limited abilities, limited finances and a desire to take a few portraits of family members
 
I wouldn't necessarily discount continuous lighting, personally, save that the ones in that link are unlikely to be powerful enough to be particularly useable. There are plenty of alternatives that are, though.
 
learningtofly said:
I wouldn't necessarily discount continuous lighting, personally, save that the ones in that link are unlikely to be powerful enough to be particularly useable. There are plenty of alternatives that are, though.
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Not sure there are. The brightest continuous lights I've tried are the Lencarta Quads, with 4x 105w bulbs. Even they are marginal for portraits, I got 1/125sec at f/5.6 ISO400 with their 80cm softbox at 1.0m.

That compares with say the new Elinchrom D-Lite One studio flash which only has 100Ws but gave 1/200sec at f/11 ISO100 - about five stops brighter, some 32x, and with an effective flash duration around 1/1000sec. That's a decent starting point for home portraiture.

Any affordable continuous lights are really for video only unless the subject is nailed down.
 
I'm not going to disagree with you because essentially you're right. I would say that the Electra Masterlite panels I use for still life/macro have been used to good effect for portraits too. Not quite the output of a decent flash head but reasonably powerful, particularly when ambient light is also decent.
 
learningtofly said:
I'm not going to disagree with you because essentially you're right. I would say that the Electra Masterlite panels I use for still life/macro have been used to good effect for portraits too. Not quite the output of a decent flash head but reasonably powerful, particularly when ambient light is also decent.
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Which is precisely what you don't want from your studio lighting, the general rule when using continuous lights should be to remove every other light source. You don't want your carefully crafted shadows filling in with light of a different temperature:eek:.

With flash it doesn't matter because the exposure differences are such that the ambient won't noticeably affect your images.
 
As above. And I would add that you don't want your carefully crafted shadows filling in with light of any colour temperature.

Sadly, this is the bit that most beginners, including some people who don't know that they're beginners, don't seem to get. Studio lighting is all about creating and controlling light, it isn't about the quantity of light per se, it's about the quality. In other words, it isn't enough to be able to manage with the quantity.

There are odd (and expensive) exceptions, but most continuous lighting as used in home studios lacks quality as well as quantity. It's usually impossible to use a good range of light shapers, it's usually impossible to get enough power, so even if the lights have adequate (any) power adjustment, people tend to use them at full power, and to use them close to the subject even if they don't want the lighting to be soft.

And, with the stuff at the cheap end of the market, regardless of the claims made by sellers, the fluorescent lamps are very likely to be designed for home use, not photographic use, and to have a very low CRI. This has NOTHING to do with colour temperature and everything to do with the colour rendition, i.e. the accuracy or otherwise of how different colours are reproduced.

I'm not against continuous lighting. Lencarta has the QuadLite, which without doubt is the best available in its class, and it is perfect for video, which is what it is designed for. A lot of beginners use it for still photography and it's by no means unknown for me to use it for some small still life jobs, but at the end of the day flash is a much better choice for most people, most of the time.

Of course, most of the people who buy continuous lighting for still photography probably do so because it's cheap and because they think that it's easier than flash. Well, it's easier I suppose than hotshoe flashguns or cheap studio flash heads that have inadequate modelling lamps, but people who are in the market for continuous lighting really ought to think about the quality of the light, because if they do that they will generally end up either with studio flash or with the much more expensive continuous lighting that has enough power, plus the ability to fit a full range of light shaping tools.
 
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