Softening my strobes

[mikeplow1961]

Hi all, recently purchased one of those fleabay strobe sets as an intro to doing some studio type portraits and am getting along okay with them.

However because I am a student of the more is more school of buying, they are 300w and possibly (okay, definitely) a bit overkill as I didn't really consider the tiny room I am working in. (workspace is literally about 8x9feet).

I'm getting results I'm happy with, did my first kiddie portrait shoot at the weekend and it went fine, parents v happy etc, but I'm shooting up at f11/f13. No problem with this as I don't get focus probs but there are times I'm going to want to have a much shallower dof on close shots so want to be able to throttle my lighting back and use an open aperture.

I'm generally using two of the strobes with softboxes with an inner baffle. Even at their lowest setting I'm at f11. I can't move lighting further away due to the small space.

So question is, can I/do I add more filter in the softbox? Is this possible? Or should I get some sort of ndr filter for the strobes? They are Neewar 300c's.

Any help, advice, mockery welcome.

 

[TomTomTom]

You can move the lights further away, but that gives you harder light, or you can put filters over the strobes to chop light that way. By far the easiest method however is to just stick a neutral density filter onto your lens and fire away, that way you can easily get exposures at <f2.8 with far less hassle.

 

[Garry Edwards]

As above, if your lens will autofocus properly with a ND filter on it. If it won't, use ND gels over the flashes.

 

[mikeplow1961]

Thanks for the advice guys. Much appreciated. I'll try the filter over the lens solution first as it'll be the quickest option if I need to do it during a shoot.

 

[bryan elliott]

I'd say put nd gels over the lights as its cheaper and your not going to put the quality of the image at risk, unless your spending hundreds of pounds on high quality filters,