Do i need one, two, three or 18 thousand lights?

Time for some text instead of images :D

Quite often i get a question from new photographers wanting to start with studio photography and that is how many lights do they need. The answer to this is quite simple. You need one light. Thats it…. to start with. 

My advice is always, get one light first and make that light a good quality light. Its better to spend your money on a better quality light than try to get two for the same price as one. There are a lot of package deals with two weaker lights which are as expensive or even more expensive than getting a stronger solo-light. And if you look at the used market you can pick up a used Profoto Compact 600ws flash or similar Elinchrome/Bowens/etc for the same price as one of those 2 x 150ws no-name brand flashes.

What do you get with a better quality light then? You get colour temperature accuracy, you get proper exposure accuracy, you get speed and you get reliability. If you shoot 500 images during a session, and you have to color correct 500 of those because your flashes were not consistant during the shoot and warmed up and became hotter as the session went on, then you will hate those flashes.

So back to the original question then. Why just one light? Well if you look at my images, i can say that most of them are shot with one light source. In some instances, i may have used a second light for background and rim-light effects, but that is fairly rare in my type of shooting. At most i’ve used 4 lights on one shoot. And 3 of them were basically gelled lights for color effects.

So does this mean that you never will use more than one light? Of course not, but it depends on the situation. And unless you shoot a lot of interiors that require point-lighting and such i would wager a guess that you will be shooting a lot more with one light than with two or more.

Now, the people still awake while reading this will probably wonder “but.. doesnt one light give only one look?” and the answer to this is ofcourse not =) You have one lightsource yes, but that can be bounced, filtered, diffused and messed with in countless ways.

I would like to direct you now to a master of lighting who unfortunately is no longer with us. He revolutionized lighting back in the 80’s with his very simple and no-nonsense approach to lighting and even though the equipment he uses today may not be like your digitial camera, the theories and ideas still apply. For a quick taste of some his ideas and lectures you can have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYM6cQYgEgk

His very good DVD set can be found at http://www.deancollins.com/

In the end it’s vital to start learning how to think lighting, rather than being caught up in technicalities. All that stands between a ok lighting and a great lighting may just be a small bouncecard made from a piece of white cardboard ;)