So I am brand new to studio photography and looking into getting some lighting for beauty work. I want to do a strobe on a beauty dish for a main light, but I was wondering if I could use speedlights for background and fill lights, as I can't afford to buy three strobes and speedlights run cheaper. Would a strobe and two speedlights work? Thank you!
Well, yes this would work. I would recommend you to start with one speedlight and observe how the light is behaving from different distances and angles. A good thing to do is to buy in to a off-camera flash system that has support for both speedlights and strobes. You could use optical sync on the speedlights to trigger them.
I would recommend phottix mitros+. It has a built inn reciever and transmitter. You could then end up with two mitros+ and a phottix indra 360/500 studio strobe. Hope my comment was helpful.