Studio lighting can be broken into two main categories. There is continuous light and flash light. Continuous light has two main advantages, yet it has many disadvantages, which we will touch on momentarily.
Continuous Studio Lighting
The benefits of using continuous studio lighting are:
-Continuous lighting is very inexpensive. It makes a great starting place for anyone who is starting out or on a small budget.
-With continuous light, you can see what the light 'is doing', meaning you can see where the highlights and shadows are. This makes adjusting continuous light a relatively easy task.
The primary disadvantages of continuous studio light are:
-Continuous light tends to produce much more heat than it does light.
-The light that continuous lighting produces is not balanced to daylight
All right, so what does this all mean in simple terms? The heat that is produced by a continuous light source can make both the photographer and models or actors very uncomfortable. Also, the light from a continuous light source tends to make subjects irises close down, which does not make attractive portraits.
Most of us have taken pictures in artificial lighting and ended up with yellow colored photos. To our eyes, the light from a tungsten bulb looks very white, but, in fact, it is quite a bit more toward the yellow range of the color spectrum than daylight is.
There are three main ways to overcome this yellow light problem. First, you can put a filter on the lens of the cameral that will allow you to use any daylight film. You can also use tungsten balanced color film. This is probably the easiest and most sound way to balance for a tungsten light source.
Though these two solutions will make an improvement of a yellow light situation, they also both have a big problem. As a tungsten bulbs lives out its life, the filament inside the bulb leaves a little bit of tungsten residue on the inside surface of the glass envelope in the bulb.
What this means for you and photographers around the globe is that not only do tungsten bulbs produce yellow light, but this light becomes progressively more yellow over time, so that you will constantly be readjusting your yellow light fixes.
Obviously, if you are shooting digitally or using print film, color cast can be corrected when printing, but slides cannot be fixed! Therefore, the third correction for tungsten continuous lighting is simply to shoot in black and white.
