IDIC Photo Blog: IDIC Photo's Cool-Flo Studio Portrait Lighting

At IDIC Photo we often have to travel to client sites for portrait sessions or need to shoot formal bride & groom photoshoots before a reception. Hence the ability to provide a portable, yet high-quality professional portrait studio complete with lighting is of paramount importance to our business. After a lot of research and trials, we decided to standardize on Britek Continuous Cool-flo Daylight-balanced flourescent lighting (they can be purchased from Amazon.com as well). Cool-flo lighting provides a number of advantages over traditional strobe lighting and especially over older "hot" incandescent / halogen lighting. Scott Kelby sings the praises of cool-flo lighting in Volume 2 of his popular Digital Photography Book and mentions how people he meets are amazed by the results of cool-flo and it is the latest rage in studio portrait photography.

Some advantages of cool-flo over traditional strobes and halogen:

Cool to the touch -- flourescent continuous lighting stays cool even after hours of use. Models do not feel the heat like being in a sauna as compared to halogen lighting.
Green! Use much less power as compared to halogen lights and last much longer.
"What you see is what you get" - while even professional photographers may struggle with flash strobes at times (which go off only for an instance), with cool flo continuous lighting there is no guesswork!
Daylight-balanced light! They produce beautiful, soft light perfect for portraits.

Here are some shots of what IDIC Photo's portable studio based around cool-flo lighting looks like. We have two lamps with 4x daylight-balanced bulbs each providing a total of 1200 Watts-equivalent Cool-flo Flourescent Daylight-balanced Continuous Lighting (isn't that a mouthful!). One of the lamps can serve as the main light, the second one as a hair-light or fill light. We use Lastolite 36" sunlite / softsilver reflectors as well. Simple black or white top-quality muslin cloth backgrounds with stands are also part of the studio setup.

Another view of the portable studio. The image on the right shows the studio packed-up, ready for easy transport to a customer site. Setup and take-down only take approximately 15 minutes each!