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Greetings Jessica: First, don't feel ignorant. Just ask away and if anyone gets smart with you, let me know so we can dope slap'em. :>)) [We're very protective of newbies around here]. It's good that you're reading alot of course, but as I mentioned recently, some of the consumer trade publications print equipment reviews that strongly favor (and please) their advertisers so you kind of have to sift through all the material to make an informed decision about what to buy or pass on. Also, I recommend you come up with like a minimum equipment list of things you feel you should have in your basic kit and some basic criteria for how you intend to use it. For example, do you want to just work at home or want a rig that's portable that you can take on location to a park or someone elses house. Do you need stands, a battery operated power supply or just one that plugs into a 110 volt outlet. For lighting, I usually recommend that instead of buying lighting packages, they find a manufacturer they like, like Norman, Bowens, Speedotron, Calumet, Elinchrom, and others, buy either a pretty powerful monolight (self-contained portable flash) or a light weight pack system that will accept multiple heads. In other words, start with one light, get a good one, and grow into the system as your abilities grow. All of the portraits in my gallery here were shot with a single light in a 3x4 foot Chimera softbox or stripbank. Light modifiers like softboxes can be cheap or expensive. I suggest you drop the dime and get a good one like a Chimera because they last. I've had one of my Chimeras for over 20 years and it gets a LOT of use. You also need a mounting ring for your softbox to your light so you need to know the lights youre going to have in advance of buying a softbox with the ring. Umbrellas are good, reasonably priced like Eclipse 60" diameter brellas that you can interchange the fabric and make them shiny or dull. The foil idea you came up with is good, but foil as you may have found, produces a pretty hard reflection. Umbrella reflectors can be used to soften, diffuse and wrap the light around your subject (when properly set-up) and only cost a few bucks, like $40 or 50 for one that's pretty sturdy. Having a flash meter, or a meter that will measure flash, ambient light in the reflective and incident modes is useful. You can get some good used ones with warranties at KEH.com or new at bhphotovideo.com. For x-mas stuff? Get a B&H Photo Catalog. It's a full-year full of reading material. LOL !!! If it's not in their catalog, you don't need it.
Calumet Photographic sells Monolights under their name, so does B&H under Bowens Monolights. Take a look at those. Nope. the kind of lights you buy isn't related to the camera you use. Lastly, for now, if I were you I'd stay away from package deals on e-bay. It's a jungle there and if you don't know what you really need or want, you can get really cheap equipment that looks nice but lasts about 10 minutes in use. Meanwhile, just hollar if you need us and all this so far should get you started. Stick around. In no time, I'll lay odds you know a lot more than the guys in the camera store :>)) Oh yeah, do searches in the archives here for lighting info too you might find useful.
Take it light.
Mark
10/5/2006 1:05:47 PM
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