Les Jones

Digital or 35mm?

Digital you should be able to adjust the white balance in the camera if you are under fluorescents. (I don't remember the color temperature off-hand, but it is different from both tungsten and daylight.)

35mm? (Or digital done right) Get 2 cheap flashes (or good ones if budget allows), one cable, one remote flash activator, 2 stands and use slow film (back in the day, it was Kodachrome 64 exposed at about ASA 62 - the colors were surreal. No idea what you would use today). Put the main flash on a tripod or stand with a bounce card slightly above the subject. Use the white side of a Kodak Neutral Gray card and a wire coat hanger to set it up. Set the main flash at 100% and put the fill light @ 25% - you should run at least one test roll- depending the the performance of the meters in the flash, you may have to dial the main back a bit. Set the fill light on another stand with a bounce card slightly below the subject. Make sure the meters on the front of the flashes are pointing at your subject. (Getting the flash off camera by even 9 or 10 inches and making it a bit diffuse will eliminate red-eye.)

Fluorescent lighting can overpower Ektachrome 100 or Fujichrome 100. (Significantly faster than ISA 64.) With digital that isn't a problem, just dial in the white balance. With film, it is an issue (It will shade everything a slight green color if you are using daylight/flash film.

Add a background light low - needs something to meter off - to go completely nuts (and eliminate shadows) and a hair light - very high and behind the subject - if you want to be complete. Cheap flashes used to be available at Adorama. B&H usually has better quality stuff, but still some decent buys. (More lights imply more testing to be sure of relative power settings.)

Set the camera on 1/60th second, and adjust the aperture to match your setting on the flash. If you want to change aperture, you have to change settings on EACH flash.(If you mess this up you won't get bad pictures, they will be jet black or pure white.) Try it couple of times.

If you will always be in an environment that has 110, look at something like White Lightning flashes. Good - much cheaper than true flash kit. Umbrellas and soft-boxes are nice, but now you need an apprentice to schlep your gear around for you. You need more expensive flashes as well - though the monolights will work.

All of this is also good for digital - You can hand-hold the camera since the flash freezes motion. Using the complete set up sounds expensive. Check the indymogul website for cheap digital lighting ideas. They are shooting video, but for digital it works. Lights can be hot. They also have the cheap light stands build somewhere. The cheap setup can work for film if you buy daylight or full spectrum bulbs. And then you get to use the meter in your camera.

35mm is still better than any digital camera costing less than about 2 or 3 grand. And your current 35mm plus a decent film/negative scanner is much less than 4 grand, though you do have film and developing costs.

If you want to go really nuts, pick up a book on the Zone System, and the Zone System as it applies to color, though with flash, you will have pretty even lighting. Zone would work more for ambient or natural lighting situations. (You can't fix everything in photoshop.... if there is no detail in the whites or in the shadows, you can't add them after the fact. If there is some detail you can bring it out, but you have to capture the details at the time you push the shutter release.)

And be careful of Photoshop, you can end up with pictures that don't look like your subjects. (Remember, we love people because of their imperfections.) Fashion photography is not portrait photography. There is a whole series of famous portraits done in extreme side-lighting (Adams?) that brings out the crows feet, etc. and shows us exactly how we should look as we age. (It isn't a bad thing to grow old, and it is certainly better than the alternative.)

"When shot with a high quality lens, a 35 mm Kodachrome slide will hold detail eqivalent to 25 or more megapixels of image data"

Digital cameras with that many megapixels are still pretty expensive.

I'm shooting digital. My one and only 35mm from the 1990 died right before the new millennium and I never looked back.

I like the idea of a backlight. Even a regular lamp coming from the rear could make a difference. Thanks for the indymogul.com link. I don't think my employer will pay for much in the way of lighting, so cheap solutions are good.