Monolights Revisited

Monolights Revisited

by William Lulow

Just a week or so ago, I wrote a piece about speedlights and monolights. Today, I wanted to say a bit more about them. These lights are battery powered, for the most part, but may use normal electric outlets as well. They have been popular for a long time because of the ease of using them on locations. They have also gained some followers of late because they are actually LESS powerful than the older, studio strobe units.  These days, with digital sensors, we just don’t need the power we used to with older, view cameras and slow film speeds.

I still use my Dynalite power packs for most studio work and speedlights for locations. They are 30+ years old, but I have maintained them and repaired them when necessary, and they still do an excellent job, but I often wind up using them on one-half or one-quarter power. That’s why I am leaning more and more to getting monolights these days. The “pros” of using them are:

1. They are much lighter
2. You don’t need cords to connect the heads to a power source. The source is built-in.
3. They take up less room and are therefor,e easier to transport.
4. They don’t put out as much power as photographers once needed, making large power packs a bit obsolete.
5. You can attach a wide variety of light modifiers to them as with other lights.
6. Many are less expensive that comparable, regular studio flash units.
7. They come with their own radio flash triggers

There are several “cons” to using monolights:

1. If something goes wrong with them, you need to send the whole light in for repair, thus depriving your studio of that entire light.
2. Batteries have to be charged constantly, therefore, the number of shots you can make with one charge is limited. It would probably be a good idea to buy more batteries than you think you might need.
3. You would need to hire extra assistants to effect a particular lighting setup, if you didn’t want to use traditional light stands. This is what some photographers are doing these days, most notably, Annie Liebovitz, who uses many assistants to hold the lights she uses for a particular job.
4. The difficulty with having assistants holding lights is that they need to be able to stand in one place, sometimes for the duration of the shoot, in order to maintain the correct “lamp-to-subject” distance. This makes for consistent exposures and is something light stands can do much more reasonably.
5. The “higher end” monolights, like the Profoto brand are very expensive (around $1,700 for ONE light). Currently, I have seven lights that I use at various times, mostly 5 at one time for most of my portrait sessions. So, owning Profoto’s arsenal of monolights would be an expensive proposition indeed! There are others which are much cheaper.

Here is a typical lighting arrangement I use for studio portraits:

This setup consists of five lights that can be turned on or off depending on what kind of effect I want. This is my most common arrangement. Often, I need to keep the cords and wires out of the way or taped to the floor to minimize anyone tripping over them. With monolights, this would not be a problem. With the exception of my super large umbrella mainlight, these “heads” or light sources, are a bit smaller than the ones I have used for years, so they would be much less obtrusive in the studio and much easier to use on location.

Here’s what this looks like in the studio itself:

Here you can see some of the wires, the power packs up against the wall, the light stands and the “gobos” as well as the tripod, camera, and the edge of my large umbrella. I think that the monolights are cleaner to use in general. Plus, as I have said, we just don’t need the power that older units had. Many of us who remember shooting with view cameras, appreciated the 2000watt/second units we had. They often let us stop lenses down to f/11 or f/16 to get great depth-of-field. Today, they are no longer needed with digital cameras. Photographers today who are still using older units, are always looking for ways to use less power!

My usual portrait sessions involve shooting about 100 – 200 frames. Many battery-powered strobe units will yield about 400-500 images on full power. So, they would still be sufficient for most of my jobs and you can always carry extra batteries. All in all, they seem a better choice for me today.