Ideas on strip lighting

Wondering if anyone has used strip lighting & could show some examples & set up. Also ideas on how to do a cheap alternative. I had seen an image where someone had used striplighting below a female face & an octobox over the head shooting down, the strip light was a little brighter than the octabox & the effect was really soft & beautiful, with wonderful catchlights in the eyes.

I'm not a fan of the catchlights, but narrow light sources have their uses. The most expensive route is a dedicated fixture called a strip light. Much cheaper is a strip box (a skinny softbox), or a rectangular SB with mask inserts. Cheapest is a narrow reflector which you illuminate with a strobe. The latter may create unwanted stray light that needs to be confined by some means.

Thank you RicoTudor. I have been looking at skinny softbox & found one (12x36) cheap but then, you have to buy the speed ring & couldn't use a regular flash, it required a glow Hexapop which I'll have to research, never heard of it before. Just wondered how often anyone would use one. I could see a use for it for athletic bodies & side lighting. I think too, that it would make great side lighting for portraits too.

Strip boxes are super useful, especially for rim lights and kickers. I've used a 1x3 ft strip horizontally for small groups.

Soulful wrote in post #17944400
Wondering if anyone has used strip lighting & could show some examples & set up. Also ideas on how to do a cheap alternative. I had seen an image where someone had used striplighting below a female face & an octobox over the head shooting down, the strip light was a little brighter than the octabox & the effect was really soft & beautiful, with wonderful catchlights in the eyes.

For the cheapest of alternatives I once bought one of these 36x6 window planters and spray painted the inside white. Worked pretty well. I cut a hole in the back and put a flash through with one of those dome things, aside from the flash you are looking at about $12 each.

This shot used two.

IMAGE LINK: http://traviswrightima​ges.com/fitness

That is some great lighting Travis. I have a planter outside, gonna have to try that. Thanks for sharing the picture, it is awesome & quite innovative!

Thanks Alveric, I'm getting that want to buy syndrome when it comes to photography, especially since I'm trying to learn better lighting. Seems I always need something - I never catch up on wanting to add to my "stuff"

It might have been this one.

http://www.lowes.com …0&pl=1&Ntt=wind​ow+planter

Just looked at the one outside - cracked & old so will get another one. Your lighting looked very professional, my daughter is into weight training, she'll love that lighting when I show her. Thanks for the link, checked it out, cheap enough. Now how did you hang it when shooting?

There's another thing you need to consider: you need to weigh the advantages of DIY solutions (essentially, low cost is the only advantage) against practicability, efficiency, consistency of results, and prestige.

If you're shooting only in studio and mostly relatives and friends –who are likely to be patient and non-judgmental–, building, tinkering, fiddling with and moving around thingamagigs is probably more than acceptable. However, when you need to take your modifiers with you and deploy them on site, DIY stuff can quickly become a hassle in more ways than one.

It's playing around in my home studio, right now cost is an issue but I would love to try the techniques & if they turn out awesome, then I would be saving to buy the real deal. Thing is that I have shot a couple of weddings & functions & always shot flash on camera bounced behind me or off to the side & quite frankly I got some really good results. Lugging around gear, stands, umbrellas is not an option for me, I weigh 98 pounds, yep I said folks, hate being so puny, so I try to keep equipment to a minimum, as it is, lugging around 2 cameras etc, by the end of the day, I'm beat. Studio lighting is pretty awesome & I love all the options out there (kid in a candy store lol) but budget doesn't allow any more toys right now. I have an old Canon 300mm F4 non-IS that was my first lens in digital, I still use it once in a while but the thought has crossed my mind to sell it to buy better lighting, don't think I can part with it though!

I wouldn't sell that lens to buy lighting, especially if you're talked into buying sinojunk.

Experiment away, if you have the means. And take notes, so that when you get something good you'll have a permanent reference as to how to replicate it. I'd buy a sketch pad and use it for lighting diagrams.

Good advice Alveric thanks! If anyone has any more photos to share of said lighting, it would be nice if you could post to share, thanks!

Take a look at this web site's photos.

This is the setup I used for their headshots:

Fotodiox are great, I've got 2 large and 2 small. Grids are available.