Looking to shoot portraits but need to acquire some lighting gear? What should you get, strobes or continuous lights? While both offer their pros and cons, here are a few reasons why you shouldn't use continuous lights for your portrait photography.
If you plan to shoot video and photos, you might be looking into obtaining a continuous LED light set to use for both. However, there are several reasons why continuous lights are not the best choice for portrait photography. In this video, photographer John Gress covers a few reasons why continuous lights are not the best option for general purpose photography.
To start off, Gress does highlight some of the pros of why you would want to use continuous light but quickly moves into the reason why you wouldn't, which is their power. Gress explains several reasons why you would be at a disadvantage with continuous lights through different scenarios in this video.
While continuous lights could work for some portraits, if you are wanting to create the best professional photos possible in most situations, they may not be the best choice for you. Which do you find would work best for you, strobes or continuous lights?
Lol... You can just go a ahead and write your comments. You don’t need tell us about your future plans to comment on a an article.
You are right but then you aren't - what you really meant is that LED is not the right tool for your photo style, but available light, led, tungsten and even candle light have been use and will be for artistic reasons - it all depends of what you want.
You definitely can use any kind of light, and even a combination of continuous light and strobes for "creative" purposes, like multi-exposure shots with body movements. His point that for a "standard" studio looking shots a strobe is simply a better, more painless choice. You will need a helluva powerful (= exteremely expensive) continuous light to shoot at f/11 @ 1/200-/1250s, that will probably burn though your light modifiers and set the hair of your model on fire ;)
Well, heat won't be an issue. But brightness will. I hail from back in the day when we commonly used 1500-2500 watts of incandescent lights to get settings of f/5.6, 1/250, at ASA (ISO) 200. You can do with wider apertures and slower shutter speeds with professional models and actors, but not with retail clients like families and children.
That light was hot--that's the power of a space heater--and it consumed all of the power available on a residential circuit. LEDs today won't be a heat or power problem, but lumens are still lumens, and that amount of continuous brightness is difficult to bear.
But wait...lumens aren't even lumens. In my experience, there is something particularly irritating to the eye about LED lights. At the same lumen emittance, LED lights appear much brighter than incandescent lights.
Not to mention that LEDs blink. And many LEDs have very poor RCI, meaning they can mess up colors.
And are much more expensive.
All those points are valid. Another reason not to use continuous LED-light is the missing light colour bands most of these lights suffer from.
More reasons to buy the aputure 600d pro. ☺️
That must be the laziest article ever published on Fstopper. Are you kidding me? You offer no insight whatsoever about the video. Nothing. NOT A SINGLE SING! Sorry, but I don't have time to watch videos. Writing 3 lines about the pros and cons would be too difficult for the writers here? Jeez...
Agreed. This "article" written by a human being is only a tiny bit more useful than my YouTube home page which is populated with videos by an algorithm.
Because all professional portraiture is shot at f/11 or f/16 :p
Or you could just buy a modern digital camera, and use its high ISO capabilities.
The higher the ISO, the lower is the dynamic range.