Monolights Revisited Again

Monolights Revisited Again

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 because I decided to update my lighting equipment to include them. This is the first time I have bought new lighting in over 30 years. I have always added to some of my lighting when necessary and have always kept my equipment in top shape, but it has been a long time since I bought new lighting. I always used to say that “light is light” and that it didn’t really matter where it came from as long as the photographer knew how to use it. But these studio strobes are so much lighter and more compact than the older Dynalites I have been using for most of my professional career, and that for an experienced pro like me, it just made sense.

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. So, monolights with some of their faults, seem to be the better choice today. The “pros”:

1. They are much lighter
2. You don’t need cords to connect the heads to a power source. The source is built-in therefore the studio is much cleaner; no wires on the floor.
3. They take up less room and are therefore, 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 than 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. And, as with all batteries, you need to monitor their charge and readiness constantly.
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 could make for some inconsistency in  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. I bought 5 Westcott brand monolights and it cost less than $2,000.

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!

Here is what my setup looks like now, just the lights not an actual setup for a shoot:

Here you can see how clean the lights look without any wires. And here is some of the other equipment:

The first is the mainlight into my portrait umbrella, second, the dial on the 200watt/second light and the third is the flash trigger that mounts on the camera. I will have to test the battery life, but they are advertised as being able to last for somewhere between 400 and 500 images on full power. We will see and I will report on it in a later blog article. The main thing is that, as I said, they are less powerful than the old studio strobes which were 1000 watt/seconds total. I regularly had my mainlight set on 250 watt/seconds and the accent lights on about 125 watt/seconds, so the new lights are well within those settings.

The other key feature is that now, ALL the lights I take on location can fit in one case as opposed to the two I normally was used to carrying.

One further thought about power: Monolights are BATTERY POWERED and therefore you always have to be aware of how much power is left after a full day’s shoot. After testing the units for a couple of days to make sure everything was working correctly, I used them on a job just the other day. The manuals state that you should be able to get approximately 450 flashes from them. One of the batteries lasted for about 300 flashes and had to be replaced during my shoot. EXTRA BATTERIES ARE A NECESSITY.

Here is an image from my first location shoot using the new lights:

Everything worked well and the basic handling of the lighting setup was much easier than with my older Dynalites. I could adjust the position of lights and move them around more quickly during the shoot. More importantly, the results were up to my usual standards. For most of these portraits, I used just four lights – main light umbrella, soft-box fill-in (when needed), background and accent light.

I will update the entire studio setup in a future blog article.