On 2013-04-26, Bruce L. Bergman (munged human readable) wrote:
On Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:17:30 -0700, Gunner Asch
wrote:

[ ... ]

Anyone have any good links to "inexpensive" slave strobes? Or anyone
have any older slave strobes that they have outgrown?

[ ... ]

Quit thinking strobes! It's 2013, Floods will do! If it looks good
to your eye, it will look good to the camera.

Agreed -- at least if you let the camera learn the proper color
balance for the lights you have. There are a lot of presets for various
light sources, and at least some have the ability to measure the color
balance off a neutral gray card for a given setup -- and use that.

[ ... ]

The equivalent ISO of a Digital camera is miles ahead of film - the
days where you had to use ISO-25 Kodachrome to get fine grain and good
detail are long over - Besides, so is Kodachrome.

Yep. I'm shooting up to ISO 3200. (And back in the days of the
Kodachrome you mentioned, it was ASA-25, not ISO-25. :-) IIRC, the other
common system in use then was DIN -- a very different scale, and if you
were lucky, your exposure meter was marked with both scales. :-)

Get a batch of 300W or 500W Quartz stand lights, I'm sure you can come
up with *that*... And for reflective surfaces you rig up some cloud
diffusers in front, or bounce them off aluminized screen fabric. Think
Windshield Spring Shades, the aluminized side.

Try to get the lamps all close to the same color temperature - the
camera can correct the color temperature, but not if one side is lit
at 5000K and the other side at 2700K - it'll freak.

Unless you want to use the color difference for modeling shapes.
Let the camera learn the proper white balance for one set of lights
alone, and use the other to make interesting color shading.

For a background, new clean off-white canvas Painters Tarps. Already
sewn together, cheap, big enough to drape on the wall and then bring
out on the floor or table. And easy to dump in a commercial washer
with a box or two of Rit Dye if you want colors.

Well ... perhaps not for close-ups on really small things. The
coarse weave will stand out in the images.

And when you're done taking pictures, use the tarps for painting. The
paint splotches will add extra pizzazz to the photos, and nobody will
steal your funny colored dropcloths - they'd stand out in even a
satellite photo. "Hey, Gunner made a batch of Tie-Dye Buckskin Tan
dropcloths like this a few years ago, and then they disappeared from
the back of his truck..."

:-)

How about camouflage pattern?

Enjoy,
DoN.

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