[bhursey]

[QUOTE=FormElement;717976]

Originally Posted by bhursey

I would also invest in alien bee's. If your going to have a permanent studio. If mobile


Brian,

Since there is no stupid question, where and how did you go about your lighting "education"? I just started building my portable lighting kit, with a couple PW's and a convertible umbrella. I need to expand on that, but I'm not spending another dime unless I know it is:

a) Needed and
b) Great Equipment.

Since I mostly do environment and architecture, I am working on my portraiture which I really enjoy but need a lot more practice. I like seeing your lighting "in action". That is very helpful.

I got my education from just experimenting and learning. I started off with a old vivitar 2500 modified to be on a canon. I then put a black card in front to not effect the picture at 1/16th power. This would trigger my optical triggered Vivitar DF400MZ off camera to sorta have a single strobe setup. From there I expanded. to 2 lights one radio triggered the other one optically triggered. I would love to have PW's but I use cactus v4's they are much cheeper and so far have only miss fired a few times. Most of the time it was I did not wait enough time for my flash to recycle.

My daughter really got me started. Our photographer we used in our wedding stopped doing shoots on weekends only on week days. We now are 100 miles away and that would of not worked. So I decided to do my own monthly shoots through her first year. This gave me allot of practice.

What type of pocket wizards do you have are they the control tl ones or the older ones? If they are the older ones just get like SB-24 and do what most strobist photographers do shoot in manual. Now if you invested in the TL ones to take full advantage of the capabilities you would need to get like a modern ttl flash from canon or nikon depending on the model of PW you have. If you do TTL strobist it is a whole different ball field than shooting manual.

I would recommend start with one light. They are easy to cary around and it starts you learning. Then I would eventually get 2. I would offer free shoots to family and friends for practice. What I do now is do a free sitting fee and people oder prints. So far that has turned out to be about 100$ a shoot.

I found out about the SB-24 at Strobist: Steal This Flash - The Nikon SB-24

The strobist flickr group is a great resource you are required to put all of the lighting info in so other people cal learn. Flickr: Strobist.com

The basic strobe kit you need the following components (stand, hotshoe bracket, Light Modifier "umbrealla, softbox", Trigger (radio, pc cable, optical)