Getting a digital cam has been a boon to my social life but I’m getting serious about photography again. I can see myself getting a semi-pro camera in the next couple of years but until then I’ll do what I can with the mostly autmoatic Canon A10. My problem is I’m trying to rig up a champagne studio light system on a Keystone beer budget.
If I was shooting film I’d cobble something out of AC powered slave flahes and dig up my old Quantum Calcuflash flash meter. All well and good if I had a manual aperture on the digital camera. While it may not be impossible to tweak such a setup to work it sounds like an exercise in frustration.
I’m looking at conventional photofloods and wondering if that may be the way to go. I can get a couple of Smith-Victor 600 watt quarts lamps with stands for a couple of hundred. I’ve already got some umbrellas, reflectors and stands so this might be a good start. I think 1200 watts would be sufficient for portraiture and such and it would be useful for video too.
So the question seems to be is this a reasonable setup or am I just throwing money away? Any other suggestions? I know that if I stumble into a lot of paying work I’ll probably invest in a Speedotron brown line power pack and heads but that’s many nundred $ down the road.
I don’t know if this’ll directly answer your questions or not, but take a look at B&H Cameras’ Web Photo School, which has digital studio photography among its topics. Now, if the question is “how to rig up lighting for a point & shoot,” then I don’t know any answers or sources, sorry.
I sometimes use two 1000 watt photo floods for still life studio work. I shoot 100ASA to 400ASA 35mm film. At those speeds, the floods are really only useful for small inanimate subjects. They just don’t put out enough light to get a decent depth of field unless I put them in really close or use a slow (several second) shutter speed.
I’d recommend against using photo floods for large subjects or portraiture. They’re way hot, bright and uncomfortable for the model. And you’ll melt the ice cream. Either your shutter speed will be too slow or your depth of field will be too shallow - or both! But if you decide to go that way, be sure that the umbrellas and reflectors you use with photo floods are heat resistant. You don’t want to burn down your studio.
I’ve actually gotten brighter and more attractive light through my large north-facing picture window. I place a white reflector opposite to fill in the shadows. Much better than flash or flood.
I’ve also got a couple of AC slave flashes. They work great and are much more powerful than the floods. I don’t know how to do it, but there must be a way to manually calculate your exposure. I think I’d try to get that to work with your digital camera, somehow.