Ceiling light brightness?

[jdconner]

ok, i'm looking at converting a room in my basement into a studio. i've never used a studio before and none of the shoots i've done have been "paid" shoots but i have friends of friends that are wanting me to shoot protraits for them and pay me to do it. The shoots i've done before have been in the friends houses using ambient light. This is probably a dumb question but how dim or bright should the regular ceiling lights be as compared to the strobes? Should i have them off all together and have no light at all except for the stobe's modeling lamps? should there be some light or with the strobes, does it not matter how bright the ceiling lights are because you are exposing for the strobes? is there a particular ceiling light that you recommend? bulb? thanks for your help... as you can tell, i'm going to need it.

[candleman]

i normally turn off any incandescents... but 99% of the time it doesnt make a difference anyway, because the strobes overpower anything.. you're exposing for flash, not for ambient.

[jdconner]

if i wanted to do fine art nudes or something like that or had requests for that where covering part of the body in shadows and part in light is desired, would ambient light still matter or as long as the flash is a certain exposure value, it doesn't matter what the ambient light is. even if i wanted play with how the light falls and shadows fall on a model?

[Austin_HXC]

Well if your aperture is small enough, (big number), then the ambient shouldn't have any contribution. So you could take a picture without flash, and adjust your aperture until the picture is black.

But remember to have some ambient; you don't want your models to trip over your lights because they can't see anything.