Studio Setup With Monolights

Studio Setup With Monolights

by William Lulow

I know MONOLIGHTS are certainly not new. Photographers have been using them for years. Bowens introduced the first monolight back in 1963. Most of the studios I worked for in the 1970s did not use them because they needed more powerful units that were capable of greater light output. They needed enough light on their studio sets to enable them to shoot large format film that was very slow compared to today’s digital cameras. Film with an ISO (then ASA) of 50 or even 64 was the norm. So, if you were in a studio situation shooting catalog fashion images with large format cameras, you often needed enough power to be able to stop your lens down to f/11, for example, in order to record enough depth-of-field to make everything in the picture tack sharp! Art directors required it.

The first photographer I remember working for had a cart with eight, 800watt/second power packs, each powering one head in a “light bank” array that produced a whopping 6,400 watt/seconds of power. My job was to keep an eye on the “packs” to make sure they all went off at the same time. If one failed to flash, the transparency would be slightly underexposed. And, since there was no Photoshop, thus no way of altering the final image, the shot would not have been usable.

We have come a long way with technology since then. Prior to purchasing new monolights, I used a Dynalite setup which consisted of two 1,000 watt/second power packs with a series of up to seven flash heads (if I needed that many). All the necessary gear was still fairly heavy to carry and I couldn’t even pack them into one case. So, since most of my work was on location, I had quite a bit to lug around:

This amount of equipment was common whenever I traveled for an assignment.

MONOLIGHTS are all-inclusive lights that have the flash head and the power source contained in the same unit, therefore there are no wires to clutter things up:

One reason I didn’t use them before, as I mentioned, is because they were not able to produce the same power that regular, studio strobes could and I didn’t want to have to think about batteries running down. But when I switched from film to digital capture, I found I didn’t need anywhere near the amount of power that I used to with sheet film. As a matter of fact, I only need about one-fourth the light output to be able to shoot at apertures like f/11.

So, finally, this year (my 43rd in business) I made the switch to MONOLIGHTS. The one above is my main light and has about 400 watt/seconds of power. It provides at least 500 images on full power, but most of the time I use it at about the three-quarter power setting. On my last location assignment, I got way more than 700 flashes from it and the battery wasn’t even half depleted.

Modern camera sensors are much more sensitive to light than film was. I can shoot at an ISO of 200 or 400 and still get tack-sharp images which can also be edited with software. (I think I have been using Adobe Photoshop since about 2001 when I decided to give up film and converted the studio to total digital capture. This is one of my setups for a shoot that required a white background. The two smaller umbrellas light the background, distribute the light fairly evenly, and of course, are much closer to the background than the main light in order to have it reproduce as pure white:

The bottom line with lighting equipment these days is that you don’t need a whole lot of power to make the images you want. A slight deviation in exposure can now be compensated for using available software.

Here is an older studio setup shot:

Here you can see the wires on the floor and the power packs lined up against the wall. It is much less cluttered with monolights.

The units I decided to buy were WESTCOTT MONOLIGHTS. I purchased one FJ400 as my main light and four FJ200’s for my fill in and accent lights. Since the accents were normally placed closer to the subject, I didn’t require them to be as powerful as my main. They also can be individually controlled from the flash trigger mounted on the camera. Whenever I wanted to change a power setting on the old power packs, I had to go over to each one and change it. One other benefit that many photographers have availed themselves of with monolights is if they have budget for several assistants, they can do away with light stands and have each assistant hold a light. This is very handy for big location photoshoots.

A couple of location shots made with these monolights:

The takeaway from this is that monolights are easier to carry, faster to set up and take up much less room. The downside is that because they are battery-powered, you always need to check battery charge levels and even carry a few extras just in case.