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!






We get really good exposures with this setup -- F: 5/6, shutter: 1/60 with ISO 200 which is about ideal for soft, natural looking portraits:






This is the main cool-flo lamp with the diffuser removed:

Using window light for portraits

You will often hear photographers raving about window light -- especially for portraits. Scott Kelby, Joe McNally are among the few who have included examples of portraits taken with this wonderful, soft light. At IDIC Photo we try to leverage window light as well wherever possible. When doing formal portraits at a client's home, we try to setup our portable studio (background stand, muslin cloth background, fill light) near a north-facing window. This casts a beautfiul, warm light that is perfect for head-and-shoulders shots and even 3/4 portraits. An example of a portrait taken using window light (with some bounce flash and a lastolite reflector used for fill) can be viewed at http://www.idic-photo.com/gallery/5120971_hhS2h