@ebiggs1 wrote:
The 580EX II is a good place to start. Get several more and remote triggers. You will need stands, too. I take them to weddings and they set up easily and quickly. Usually only at the receptions as most churchs frown on flash or any kind of extra light. Some are OK with before and after though.
The problem, and I generally discourage folks from doing so, with home studios is the ceiling is too low. Usually a problem that can't be over come. If on the other hand your home has 10' or higher ceilings you may be OK.
Avoid hot lights and stick with strobes if you want to go bigger than the 580's.
ebiggs already addressed the studio... I'll mention the weddings.
I've always used a side-lighter (an assistant who holds the secondary flash). When I apprenticed... I was that side-lighter. The side-light is attached to the top of a mono-pod and we hold the flash wherever we need it. This means you need at least 2 flashes (we usually had 2 active flashes but we have a backup for every piece of gear... so there was always a couple of spare flashes back in the car.) Canon doesn't make the 580EX II any longer... it's been replaced by the 600EX-RT. The 600 is compatible with the optical triggering of the 580... but also has the new radio system (but then that requires either a pair of 600's or the ST-E3-RT on-camera trigger since nothing else in the line has radio.)
Lastolite makes a soft-box that works well with speedlights called the Lastolite EzyBox Speedlite. The system has a bracket on the back with a cold shoe. The cold shoe can be rotated and repositioned where it needs to be (height, front-back positioning, left-right position). This means you can mount the flash literally anyway it needs to be mounted to get the head of the flash pointed through the opening in the back of the softbox. The soft-boxes come in sizes up to 30" square. Normally with soft-boxes, bigger is better. But for a wedding these things need to be portable -- at some point these things would become too big to be practical for a wedding.
You don't necessarily have to have a softbox when you have twin flashes (a main and side-light) because the two flashes tend to cross-wash out each other's shadows (you see the shadows, but they are weak shadows instead of strong shadows.) Obviously a soft-box would provide a better look, but positioning a soft-box on a light stand isn't very mobile and that's why we used mono-pods with a live person (the side-lighter) to hold it as we move around through the day and the event.)
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
