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The Best Photography Lights

Although quality photographers have many secrets besides a good light selection, sub-par lighting can render a potentially outstanding photograph less than stellar. When choosing a photography light, the key is understanding what works best for the subject you plan to photograph. Good photographers rely as much on lights as any other artistic method or piece of equipment, and differing styles can become trademarks of their work.
  1. Natural Lighting

    • Many photographers insist that the best lighting for their subjects is natural lighting. Whenever possible, consider choosing a location for your photo shoot that allows for natural light, which generally works best for portraits and living subjects. When photographing inanimate objects such as products for catalogs or attempting to capture artistic images in intricate detail, natural light may not be the best choice. Natural light limits a photographer's ability to increase lighting on a subject, but he or she can always reduce light using a screen.

    Hot Lights

    • Traditionally, photographers choosing artificial lighting used "hot lights," or fixtures using incandescent bulbs. These lights are widely available and inexpensive, but they generate a large amount of heat. Using them on living subjects for a prolonged period of time can be problematic. The advantage of hot lights, however, is that they don't flicker at the same rate fluorescent or "warm lights" do, so they're ideal for work with digital cameras that might otherwise pick up the flicker.

    Warm Lights

    • Warm lights are any lights other than incandescent that are also not flashbulb-style lighting triggered by a photograph being taken. The most common warm lights are Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFL), which require more bulbs to achieve the same candlepower as hot lights, but use much less power and generate much lower heat. The downside for CFL specifically -- and most warm lights -- is that they flicker at a rate the human eye cannot follow, yet is detected by the shutter of a camera. As such, the amount of light available from one shot to the next can vary widely.

    Cold Lights

    • Cold lights are triggered by a photograph being taken. These can be an excellent choice if they are within your budget, but these lighting systems are typically a great deal more expensive than hot or warm setups. One downside to cold lights is the photographer doesn't know how a photo looks until after it's been taken. This makes them ideal for circumstances under which taking extra shots is not prohibitively expensive, such as digital photography.


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