Location Lighting

Location Lighting

by William Lulow

I have written about changing my lighting equipment after over 35 years of using regular, plug-in, Dynalite studio strobe units to battery powered monolights. In the past, when we were shooting with view cameras, we needed a fair amount of power from our strobe lights to be able to shoot with sheet film at good apertures like f/11 or f/16. Sometimes I would need a unit capable of putting out 1000 watt/seconds of power or more. I even had what they called a “quad flash head” which held four flash tubes that could be utilized in a light bank connected to four different power sources. Here is the flash head with sockets for four flash tubes:

As a matter of fact, one of my first photo assisting jobs was for a photographer who was shooting catalog fashion images and used eight, different flash heads connected to eight different flash generators in one, very large light bank (softbox)! One of my jobs was to keep an eye on all of them to make sure they all fired. If one did not, it would mean that the film would be slightly underexposed and the shot would be ruined. Each of these generators (packs) was capable of about 800 watt/seconds of flash each, yielding about 6,400 watt/seconds of power. That would be enough to shoot at f/11 with an 8×10 Deardorff view camera!

When I connected my smaller quad head to four different flash generators, the yield would be around 4,000 watt/seconds of power which was usually enough to make a great product shot with my 4×5 view camera, at an aperture of f/16 or so on Ektachrome film. Here is one example of the kind of shot I’m talking about made with this unit:

A shot like this called for a fair amount of depth of field and was lit with four flash heads each set at approximately 500 watt/seconds. Notice how all the product is tack sharp. This is one of the units I used to use:

This is one of my flash generators (packs) but this unit is not even set to its maximum power output.

Today’s digital sensors are far more sensitive to light than film ever was. Therefore the same levels of power are no longer needed. In the last couple of years, I have switched to the much lighter MONOLIGHTS that I use today. These are battery powered units which I never used to trust before because I never thought I was sure of how much of a charge each had or how many shots I could get with each charge. Today, though, I have plenty of battery backups and the main thing is we just don’t need the same amount of power as we used to. The other great advantage of battery powered flash units is that they can be set up anywhere. They can even be held by assistants, which is how many photographers have been using them for years. This is my latest setup while shooting a downtown, New York City law firm’s attorneys:

With some modifications, this is the basic setup I used to produce shots like this:

Note the subtle highlights on the edges of clothing and hair. And, with a little help from Photoshop, this is one of the final shots:

The idea was actually to show the warmth of the people against the cold, monochrome, New York City streets.

The extra portability of monolights combined with the far greater sensitivity to light of digital cameras makes results like this easier to obtain.