Strobe or continuous for product photography?

I’m not a pro in any way, shape or form, but I think I may have come to a crossroad with lighting for product photography & am looking for some advice regards strobe v continuous.

I’m currently using a EOS 70D, EF-S 60 2.8 macro & EF-S 18-55 kit lens with a pair of 70 watt (350 equivalent (apparently)) 5500k CFL’s. Most work is with reflective metal engineering components (many cylindrical) from roughly 1/2cm to 60cm square in size. Everything is done tethered in RAW, & ultimately ends up on a pure white, no shadow background.

The smaller items aren’t an issue, but I don’t seem to have enough light as I move onto larger products where I’m often using bizarrely long shutter speeds & even then have a load of post production to carry out. I don’t know if it’s due to my lack of skill or my current lighting, but I also have issues with DOF, but again only on larger stuff – no matter what adjustments I make & can’t seem to get a balance / reasonable compromise….. (I’m also re-reading Light, Science & Magic). I’m figuring that most these issues are related to light issue rather than technique (?), so please do tell.

I’m utterly confused with the strobe/continuous debate as there seems to be a mass of contradicting info out there. I do like continuous as I’ve got into the swing of using tethered live view & appreciate that there will be a learning curve if I move to strobe, but it’s image quality, improved DOF & a reduction in post processing time that I’m looking for & don’t mind spending the time that may be involved to get strobes working for me.

For continuous I’ve been considering Westcott products & for strobe something along the lines of the Elinchrom D-Lite RX 4/4 set or Lencarta Smartflash 2 or ElitePro 2 kit.

Any advice hugely appreciated.

sounds like you have a pretty good grasp on the problems that arise when shooting with continuous light. Not sure what else can be added other than the amount of light strobes put out is so much greater than continuous, plus the ability to adjust the strength of each light in many tiny increments with strobes, is of such a benefit it's hard to even compare the two.

Strobes with continuous modeling lights are the way to go. You retain the real-time preview nature of the continuous lighting, without the size or heat issue associated with more powerful hot lights. You get comparatively compact power, typically adjustable over a 5 to 9-stop range, often in increments as fine as 1/10-stop, and not usually less fine than 1/3-stop unless it's super cheap or old gear. Some continuous lights can be dimmed, of course, but this often requires incandescent (tungsten) hot lights to avoid light cycle issues; dimmable CFL and LED lights not intended for photography are a crap shoot. Powerful tungsten lights are actually very hot, enough to set paper on fire or melt camera gear that gets too close... ask me how I know The best dimmers for higher power tungsten lights are also the heavier, more expensive auto-transformer type (Variacs), not the solid-state duty-cycle kinds used for household lights.

fergusm wrote in post #17780297
The smaller items aren’t an issue, but I don’t seem to have enough light as I move onto larger products where I’m often using bizarrely long shutter speeds...

What do you consider too long? We used to shoot cars on 8X10 with models at exposures of 30 to 60 seconds. If you "have a load of post production to carry out", I suspect that you have some other problem besides long exposures. And as always, seeing a problem image always helps.

Left Handed Brisket wrote in post #17780321
sounds like you have a pretty good grasp on the problems that arise when shooting with continuous light. Not sure what else can be added other than the amount of light strobes put out is so much greater than continuous, plus the ability to adjust the strength of each light in many tiny increments with strobes, is of such a benefit it's hard to even compare the two.

This.
Your current problems are due to the lack of a choice of modifier and lack of light, newer continuous lights won't solve those problems easily, flash will.

But I'd go for Smartflash, spend the rest on a boom, and a bigger softbox, preferably one of their Profold ones, some other modifiers and grids. Buying better lights and kit softboxes is like buying a 5dIII and putting a kit zoom on it, it's the modifiers not the lights themselves that give you the tools to work with.

Thanks for the input folks!

PhotosGuy wrote in post #17780568
What do you consider too long? We used to shoot cars on 8X10 with models at exposures of 30 to 60 seconds. If you "have a load of post production to carry out", I suspect that you have some other problem besides long exposures. And as always, seeing a problem image always helps.

Getting up towards the 10 second mark to try & get a background that resembles white, but with larger items I can't achieve a white background before the product becomes over exposed. I generally end up with a reasonably exposed product on a patchy light grey background, which is where the post in PS is required. (sorry, no pics available to me at the moment).


I've scanned through about 100 pages in this section & I think I should possibly reconsider my lighting layout - I'm currently using the two continuous lamps on a seamless background which isn't separately lit. I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up getting strobes, in an ideal world I imagine that two lights at the front for the product itself, one overhead to remove shadows & another to blow the background out would be ideal (?), but it's just too much of an outlay - could good, white, reasonably shadow free shots be done with only two lights?

Thanks.

I'm trying to understand why you're shooting products but 4 lights are too expensive. What's your total light budget?

And I'd still like to see an image of the larger products.

Flash is going to give you more light with all things being equal. It will not give you larger spread to cover more area unless the modifier is bigger. 10 seconds isn't very long. Have you tried light painting with the continuous lights? Like Frank said, in the older days with view cameras you had really long exposures. Nothing to worry about there with a good tripod.

A lot of white-background product photography is done in white popup tents made just for this purpose, both in homes and commercial studios. It's like having softboxes on all sides of your item, and it allows for nice shadow-free and you can light the back from behind, and even put the tent on a glass table and light it from below to kill ground shadows.

Below is a picture of one being used in studio with a variety of Paul C Buff strobes. It's being lit here with softboxes because there is no harm in diffusing the light as much and as evenly as possible if you have the modifiers and light power to do it, but you definitely don't need to do this to get good results; you can light the tent cube with strobes directly and still have very little shadow.

Photo credit: Alex Koloskov, www.koloskov.com (best example I could find, pro product photographer who really knows his stuff)

Tents are great for small products but OP was talking about lighting large items.

fergusm wrote in post #17781826
Thanks for the input folks!

Getting up towards the 10 second mark to try & get a background that resembles white, but with larger items I can't achieve a white background before the product becomes over exposed. I generally end up with a reasonably exposed product on a patchy light grey background, which is where the post in PS is required. (sorry, no pics available to me at the moment).

I've scanned through about 100 pages in this section & I think I should possibly reconsider my lighting layout - I'm currently using the two continuous lamps on a seamless background which isn't separately lit. I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up getting strobes, in an ideal world I imagine that two lights at the front for the product itself, one overhead to remove shadows & another to blow the background out would be ideal (?), but it's just too much of an outlay - could good, white, reasonably shadow free shots be done with only two lights?

Thanks.

You need to understand the inverse square law, that problem is simply caused by the fact the object and background share the same light source, which is closer to the subject. A white background needs it's own lighting.

Don't take this personally, but you need to do some reading before you buy anything. Light is easy to understand once you have the basics. Being good with it is something else entirely

flowrider wrote in post #17782008
Tents are great for small products but OP was talking about lighting large items.

This^
I'd go as far as to say the tent is not required in the shot shown.

Phil V wrote in post #17782012
This^
I'd go as far as to say the tent is not required in the shot shown.

No, it certainly isn't required for that shot. I'd say it's not really the best way to shoot clear glass as you need some black out of frame to outline the contours of the glass. Granted, I'm not really a fan of light tents in general.

flowrider wrote in post #17782008
Tents are great for small products but OP was talking about lighting large items.

The OP mentioned items up to 60cm (~2 feet). The studio I shoot in has these tents from 12" cube up to 60" cube, and I've seen them used for things as large as guitars and table saws. If you need to go larger, you can always get the same effect building a tent or box out of diffusion panels.

Anyhow, my point wasn't to start the thread derailing with discussion of how to shoot glass items, it was just to point out that what you see as the white backdrop in product shots is often lit from behind, sometimes even just the front face of a softbox itself, it's not always a white paper backdrop or infinity sweep that's being overexposed by being lit from the front.

And as I mentioned, that photo above is diffusion overkill. More often with the tent setup, the tent walls are providing all the diffusion, and they are lit from outside with unmodified flash or continuous lights. You can Google light tent and see countless more typical examples: https://www.google.com …tent&source=lnm​s&tbm=isch These tents are a simple, cheap way of getting very usable product-on-white shots without tons of modifiers, or stands holding a bunch of diffusion materials.

fergusm wrote in post #17781826
could good, white, reasonably shadow free shots be done with only two lights?

probably not. it would be boring and flat.

most will tell you you have to have modeling lights, and I agree it sure makes things easier, but not a requirement. You can pick up manual speedlights for 50 bucks or less, tether your camera to a computer and just pop,pop,pop until you get the look you want.

One light for the background and two for the product would be my minimum, you will also want white and black foam core as reflectors and flags.