Stobe Power for Portraits...

[yalemba]

How powerful (W/S) a monolight strobe do I need for portrait photography? I'd like to use it on my existing softbox. Thanks.

[DaveG]

How powerful (W/S) a monolight strobe do I need for portrait photography? I'd like to use it on my existing softbox. Thanks.

I don't use all that much power when I'm shooting a portrait. As a matter of fact I run into situations where I can't get my older strobes to be as weak as I need them.

I would like to shoot portraits at around f5.6. That's enough depth of field so that I can get the subject's face to be fully in focus while the background is blurred. I do most of my business portraits on location which usually means a small room with my lights and backdrop closer to the subject than I'd like. Because of this I'm frequently forced to use a smaller aperture which results in having a sharper background than I'd like.

Obviously with Photoshop I could select the background and use something like Gaussian blur to take care of that problem. But I'm still old school enough to want to make deluxe negatives and economy prints. Imagine doing this Photoshop fix to a hundred H&S shots!

So you don't need much power to get to f5.6. I figure that 200 w/s would do it fine. But tomorrow I'll be doing something else with those strobes and that's where I would need more power. I'd be looking for something with at least 500 - 1000 w/s so that I could use them for lighting larger group shots. As long as I could adjust their power down, then there is no real downside of buying more powerful flashes, except for the money.