Photography: Hot Lights & Flash Systems

Series Summary

Photography is the art of capturing images with a camera. The earliest extant photograph, taken by Nicephore Niepce in 1826, took eight hours of exposure, prompting the photographer to search for a new process. Photography is all about light. In fact, photographs are recorded light. Lighting can ruin a photograph or make it great. Photographers have been known to wait days for the perfect natural lighting in order to get the perfect photograph. Lighting can also be created using flash systems, reflectors, and modifiers.

In this free photography video series, a professional photographer will give you great information about flash systems and different types of light modifiers including umbrellas, softboxes, white cards, snoots, and bare bulbs. Get the tips and information that you need to create the perfect lighting to capture the perfect photographs.

Video Transcript

"When you decide to buy lights to use in your photography, you're taking a pretty big step, because what you've decided to do is stop using available light and to create a light. This means you're actually creating your scene, you're creating the photograph as opposed to just taking what's there. When you're first starting out in photography and you decide to choose lighting, you usually have a lot of choices. It's usually between flash and hot lights. Now the flash I'm talking about are studio flashes, and they are quite a bit different than the kind that you put on top of your camera. Okay, so now the flash that I have here is a battery operated flash, kind of like the one on top of the camera, but the difference is, this is a lot more powerful. It's also something that you put on a stand and you can use with a modifier. You can attach modifiers to on-camera flashes and there's a whole style of photography dedicated to that, but what we're going to talk about, are these are the kind that you use as a professional, when you decide to buy a flash, when you just want to do things a little bit differently, these hold a lot more energy, they can go out in the field, get a lot more power with these and just do a lot more with them. It's like bringing my studio on location. A hot light is one that stays on constantly, but one like this is two-thousand watts and that one is a thousand watts. That's usually the minimum that you need to get lighting on a person in the studio. A flash is much cooler to operate which is much more comfortable for your subjects than a, than a hot light. And what I recommend is flash, hot lights are great, they are really good at a lot of different things but you've got some pretty, some disadvantages. First of all, you have to use, they are very hot and they are difficult to work with because you know they are hard to touch, things like that and then the modifiers have to be a lot more sturdy because of the heat. Also they don't stop action very well. For certain things, like using when you are lighting homes and things like that, the hot lights are good, but when you are actually shooting people and objects, and flashes, you can get a lot more energy, a lot more light energy out in a split second due to the capacitors on the flash, than you can with a hot light and you don't have to extend your, uh you don't have to extend your exposure times, you can do it in a click, you get it all at once, and it's just a lot easier to work with. A lot of people are intimidated by flashes, because you can't exactly see what's going on when you are shooting, but that's something you can get over very quickly, especially with the new digital cameras, that you know, you can see what's going on in the back, so after you shut that, hit that, hit that fixed shutter, you can see immediately what's going on and make your adjustments."