I signed up for an art nude photography shoot with a local photography club and we will be meeting tomorrow night. It's an indoor studio shoot, we will be taking turns and sharing studio lights. I have very limited experience using studio lighting as most of my portraits have been with speedlights or natural light. Any tips on working with studio lighting? I suppose they can't be that different form flashes, aside from the manual metering? I read online that the rule of thumb is to keep the shutter speed at about 1/125.
If there is anything different about studio lights vs speed lights [my take away of your post is that you mean continuous lighting] it's not so much any differences in quality of light [there may be some] but more about the "live preview" and its effect on your use of technique. Not that this is the whole ball of wax, but some crazy backlighting is a very entertaining way to amaze yourself, and rather tedious to manage with speed lights. Take advantage. Do the things with studio lights that will take maximum advantage of "live preview". BTW, your mention of manual metering implies that you use your speed lights on auto exposure. If you can auto expose flash and get good results, what's wrong with auto exposure for the studio lights ? It's really less challenging to meter continuous light than flash, and automation isn't all that smart, but if it can deliver for flash then it can deliver for continuous lighting. Do you use only manual metering in daylight ? As to the shutter speed question you give too little info to answer that. To control DOF you may hafta vary your shutter speeds. If you use back lighting, you need to use the lens iris to control the effect, which again impacts your shutter speeds. I don't know the FL you'll use, or know your ISO limits, nor the illumination level, but those are just more variables impacting your shutter speed. `
1) Set 'settings effects to 'off' on the camera 2) The shutter speed doesnt effect the 'flash exposure' only the ambient light. It needs to be below the maximum flash sync of your camera. Often it needs to be half a stop below because of the delay in the triggers you use. So 1/125 is a pretty good bet. 3) My guess is that the lights will probably be set up around iso100 f8. I would start there and chimp to fine tune your exposure.
