Shooting With Continuous Lights

I recently picked up a set of Flolight continuous fluorescent lights mainly for doing video but I also wanted something I could use for still photography. I finally got around to doing a shoot with them last week and overall I was pretty impressed.

Due to the lights being designed for video the color temperature is very consistentwhich really helps with white balance and color rendering. The second thing I like about them is they are very easy to set up (put on stands, plug in, turn on). Also because they are continuous lights how ever you see the light in the actual scene is how the light ends up in the camera. Another bonus, because they are fluorescent, they don't get very hot. We shot for 2 hours the other day and the room did not heat very much at all due to the lights. 

The one downside I found is the lights are not as powerful as my studio strobes. Since they are less powerful I had to increase the ISO to 400 and decrease the shutter speed and aperture to 1/100 and f4.5 as opposed to my normal studio settings of around ISO 200 f/160 f11.

Overall I was very impressed with performance of the lights and the quality of the light. Check out the photo below to see what I got using the Flolights.

Three FL-110HM Fluorescent Fixtures, Nikon D3, 80-200 f2.8, ISO 400, 1/100, f4.5