Colorful, dramatic portraits in the studio with continuous / LED lights

It was a thrill to work with the band Uncured on their promotional photos. They are focused! I expect them to break out and be huge.

During this photo session we mostly worked with the usual Profoto flashes I have in the studio. The brief was to create dramatic photos of the band. I used gridded stripboxes which were gelled. This gave the desired effect. (I will post some of the images in a follow-up post here.) But for one sequence of photos (of which three images are shown here), I changed it up with some continuous lighting … in this case the Pavotubes by Nanlite (B&H / Amazon). I used the 4-light kit with 4 ft light tubes.

You can see the lighting setup in the image below … four LED tubes / Pavotubes on light stands on either side of the band members. I set the Pavotubes to “hue loop” so that all four LED tubes would cycle through what would appear to be random colors. So with little effort I got a variety of photos with different colors. Not every shot would work obviously, but shooting like this did give a variety quickly, and with little effort.

Camera settings for all the images: f/2.8 @ 1/250th @ 1600 ISO

You’ll notice that with the wide aperture the depth-of-field is shallow. That is one of the limitations in using LED lights / continuous lighting — it just isn’t as powerful as flash. With the studio flash sequences of the band members, I am able to control the depth of field because I was able to reach an aperture of f/16 which would help get everyone in focus even though they are staggered.

But with this sequence, the intention was to have the singer, Rex, in focus, drawing attention to him. So the fact that the LED lights have less power than flash units, was used to our advantage here with the intentional shallow depth-of-field

Also check out this related post where we used studio lighting with gridded stripboxes and gels.