Group Test: Lighting kits

Photographic lighting comes in all shapes and sizes these days. Discover the best fit for your particular image-making needs

Discover the best system for your image-lighting needs

For a home studio setup, or if you’re shooting indoors on location, there’s no beating the power and versatility of a conventional mains-powered flash kit. Prime options include the likes of the Elinchrom D-Lite and Interfit Honey Badger twin-head kits, which are easy to carry around, yet quick to set up and simple to use.

The only real problem is if you want the versatility of being able to shoot outdoors using a flash head to supplement natural daylight. Mainspowered kits won’t be much use if there’s nowhere to plug them in, but there’s a growing range of batterypowered flash heads that are as powerful as most studio heads, and vastly more so than flashguns. When you’re supplementing the sun or even overpowering it to turn day into night, you’re only likely to need a single flash head, but twin-head kits are also widely available.

The increasingly common third option is to go for a constant light. Traditionally, lamps often used halogen bulbs and ran horrendously hot, but there’s been something of an LED revolution in recent times.

Ultra-bright LEDs laid out in a matrix across a rectangular or circular panel can be an alternative to a flash head, although the maximum light output will be much lower. Plus points include a ‘what you see is what you get’ approach to lighting a subject. And when you’re shooting video, constant LED lighting is perfectly viable, whereas a flash head will be entirely useless.