Hello from Texas

[Kevin Kelly]

I'm a long time amateur stills photographer getting more involved with shooting moving pictures. I'm interested more in documentary and no-budget narrative shooting.

I've been visiting this site for several months, and really appreciate the good information that shows up here.

Kevin

 

[Michael Carter]

Read all you can around here, there's years of great stuff.

I was in the same boat as you, shot fashion for 15 years in Dallas in the film days. To differentiate myself, I studied cinematography and bought film-lighting style gear, long before I ever though this stuff would be on the desktop. When the DVX came out, I started shooting motion.

If you're moving from strobes, your biggest decision may be daylight vs. tungsten. With affordable flos, HMI, HID, and even LED, you can build a daylight kit with far less heat and power issues. Much of that gear isn't as "pretty" out of the box and takes some creative gelling and bouncing, but to shoot in a location with daylight through the windows it's pretty killer, and you can get an amazing amount of light on a household circuit. (a 4-tube chinese biax unit's under $300 and pulls 220 watts and equals something around 700-1000 watts of tungsten - to get a tungsten unit to daylight at those lumens, you'd need about 2500 watts.) You'll eventually want a kit with both types, but if I were starting over, I'd start with flos and try to get an affordable HMI in the 1200 range.