tdodd
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Thanks.
But this brings me to the point I have been trying to make on this thread and your "Speedlite" thread. Nobody can tell you what equipment you should buy. You need to figure out what you want to shoot and how you want to shoot it. Look at examples and find out how they were shot. Look at lighting diagrams and see how the lighting was set up - how many lights, where they were positioned, what modifiers were used, how to slim a figure or face, how to broaden them.
In the post above I've shown examples shot with one Speedlite, two Speedlites, two Speedlights and a three light setup with studio strobes and a Speedlite (only because there weren't enough studio strobes available).
So, you can shoot portraits with one light, but two give you more options and three give you even more options still. Studio strobes are powerful and can fill large modifiers easily. They also recycle quickly, don't overheat and provide modelling lights for ease of setup. Manual hotshoe flashes are cheap, very portable, don't need a power supply, but they are relatively weak, have no modelling lamp and force you to shoot more slowly. Speedlites offer the same pros and cons as cheaper manual flashes, but cost a small mint. The advantage of ETTL is wasted in the studio environment and really in most situations where you use flash off camera. The real value is in using ETTL with the flash on camera to give you flexibility and speed when shooting in an uncontrolled environment where lighting and/or subject distance and composition are dynamically changing. If you're not interested in shooting like that then I think that Speedlites will be a needlessly expensive option. As to studio vs hotshoe - it's your choice. The pros and cons have been highlighted.
Regarding lenses, on a cropper you could actually do a fair job with your 17-85, because the 85mm end is actually pretty sharp and f/5.6-f/8 should be about right in the studio. I don't have any "studio" type shots with that lens but I do have some candid portraits and they look OK to me. These were shot with my 30D when I was still a relative novice. Both are assisted with on camera ETTL flash courtesy of a 580EX....
That does not mean that a 50/1.4 or 1.8 wouldn't be nice to have, or an 85/1.8 or 100/2. There is no right or wrong here. They are all just options. The working space you have is probably the biggest consideration when it comes to lens choice because you need the range of focal lengths to fit everything you want into your composition, but also to avoid unpleasant perspectives when shooting tighter shots. A 24-105 will give you a little more useful range, a little less DOF if you wish, and hopefully a little more IQ throughout. Primes will give you some more creative options and take some away. They may well improve IQ too, but unless you are printing at pretty large sizes it's probably an IQ improvement you won't actually need or see in the final product.
My advice to you would be to stop thinking so much about equipment acquisition and instead focus more on acquiring more knowledge. Work with what you have already and determine if and where it is letting you down. The best way to learn is at the beginning, not to jump in with both feet and end up buying loads of gear. It's a bit hard to improvise a strobe if you don't already have one. Ditto a brolly, stand and trigger. But you can improvise a background from a flat sheet clamped to a curtain rail, or even use a plain wall.
Here's a shot I took a while ago in my bathroom. The light is coming from a pair of 150W tungsten worklights placed behind the shower curtain. The shower curtain is acting as a diffuser/softbox. The bathroom door is acting as a reflector for fill. The background is a 110cm popup reflector. It's not the best setup on the planet, but an experiment and an opportunity to stick a toe in the water and start learning without much expense.
Of course the woeful power of 300W of continuous lighting forced me to open up to f/2.8 simply to achieve a 1/50 shutter speed at 400 ISO. Not ideal, but the point is that I was learning.
In this example I shot at 90mm on my 40D simply because I had to narrow the field of view as my background was so tiny. If I had shot with a shorter, wider lens I might well have failed to fill the frame with my limited background. This issue translates to shooting on a larger scale too. If you want to shoot full length you need plenty of space for a large background and/or the room to stand well back and shoot with a longer lens.
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