Studio lighting course - tungsten lighting

Well I have attended the first session of my course and the focus was on tungsten lighting.  I have a little knowledge of using continuous lighting from The Art of Photography course where I experimented using a builders light.  However, what I really wanted was a play around with the real McCoy.

Tungsten lighting or continuous lighting and is constant and extremely bright.  The tungsten bulbs we used were 500watts which may not seem to much (especially when trying to get a good shutter speed) by they are very bright for the model.

For the practical session we worked in groups of three and I was first to act as model.  We used a red head with an 850 watt buld which was very bright in my eyes.  It was almost blinding and pretty uncomfortable too.  You started to feel quite hot very quickly under the light.

I found that shooting in this light was easy in relation to seeing where shadows were falling.  You could use your camera's own meter to get the exposure right.  However, I did find that the light was pretty harsh and introduced some strong shadows in my subject's face.  This might work well for a certain look you may be trying to achieve or for shooting men.  For women the general rule is that the light and shadows should be softer.

To soften the light we have to make it bigger and to do this we used a diffuser.  This made the light softer and the images less contrasty.  The joy of working with continuous lighting is you can see the changes in front of your eyes whereas with flash you can't.

To manipulate the light and direct light to open or reduce shadow areas you can use reflectors.  I am familiar with using these as I already to this for shooting in natural light.  This improves the results but I still couldn't help feeling that the light was still very harsh overall.

Generally tungsten lighting is not used for portraits as it is not the most comfortable for clients/models to sit under this light.  It tends work better for still life images where your subjects don't have eyes!

This session gave me some hands on experience of using tungsten lighting and I learnt the most suitable conditions for using this light. I have read about making the light source bigger but I have now experienced this first hand.  I do have a speedlite of my own but this is not an ideal tool for learning the basics of lighting.

I learnt that studio lights get extremely hot and that bulbs don't tend to last very long.

Here are some of my images.

In this image we can see the strong shadows on the subjects nose.  I find this distracting as the shadow is very close to the eye too. 

In this image the shadow is strong but it is less distracting.  

In this image the shadow is less harsh and the lighting is more evenly distributed across the model's face.