LED light panels for portraits etc

[si019]

Have seen some talk about using LED light panels for studio and portraits type photography. Wanted to get some feedback as to what experiences people have and advantages/disadvantages compared to normal lighting setups and mainly how effective they are.

 

[Phil V]

Have seen some talk about using LED light panels for studio and portraits type photography. Wanted to get some feedback as to what experiences people have and advantages/disadvantages compared to normal lighting setups and mainly how effective they are.

Generalisations:

They're not particularly bright compared to flash, but you should be able to get away with portraits.

The cheap ones have a low CRI, so colour fidelity could be an issue if you're not buying the better ones.

They're portable and easy to use, and a decent learning tool if you play to their strengths.

IMHO, learning to use flash is a little more difficult, but once you know what you're doing it's far more flexible than continuous lighting.

 

[Byker28i]

For video work in small areas they are brilliant due to no heat given off. The other advantage is that you can see the lighting effect before you take the image. The disadvantage is the light output isn't as much as flash so you end up getting them closer or adding more, which then brings into question the size of the light source. Whilst you can turn them down, I'm not sure if they do modifiers now, but most led panels have somewhere between a 40-60 degree beam angle.

 

[Garry Edwards]

Low power and very poor colour rendition (with the affordable ones) are the obvious drawbacks, but the biggest problem really is the fact that you can't fit modifiers to control the quality of light, which is what photographic lighting is actually all about.

Those LED panels are too small to create soft lighting and too large to create hard lighting. In terms of creativity and versatility, I would say that they're no better than the old fashioned Redhead hotlights that we all ditched in favour of flash many years ago.

 

[si019]

Thanks for the feedback guys, much of what you said is what I had throught, but hearing from people of experience is always good. Will stick with my speedlights, softboxs and umbrellas.