I am very new to any type of "studio lighting". I purchased a very cheap set of continuous lights which are just powerful flouresent lights going through shoot through umbrellas. The light bulbs are 4 85 watt light bulbs (2 for each umbrella). My camera is a Canon 300d rebel and my lens is a 24-70 F2.8L. The first pictures I took have like a screen door effect and not sharp at all. Shooting with the flash produces very smooth skin which is always sharp. The picture was taken at iso 200 aperture 4.0 and shutter 1/45 on a tripod. Any ideas as to what is causing this effect? The floresent lights? The umbrellas? Please see picture via link below.
Main light was setup at 45 degrees to the right and other light was placed at twice the distance about 60 degrees to the left.
That is one bizarre photo dude! Looking at it magnified, I find that every other row is of higher brightness. This probably due to the way that the color sensors are arrayed on the sensor (in a Bayer array, every other row is green) combined with the fluorescent lighting (which generally has a high percentage of green light compared with other lighting sources.) I suspect that you have overexposed on the green channel. IIRC, the rebel does not have an individual color histogram display, making this kind of exposure problem impossible to detect while shooting.
You could try underexposing by a stop or so while shooting and fixing the exposure in post processing. If it works, this would confirm the hypothesis. Then, you could invest in relatively inexpensive gel filter material to put over your lamps to end up with a more balanced distribution of colors from the fluorescent lights. The filter you are looking for is pink, like a "Lee minus green " number 247.
Be sure to manually set your white balance when mucking about with these kind of lights.
Hey thanks for the response. I shot the picture in RAW so I will take a look at the RGB histogram in my editor. Tonight I think I will take some shots with just the bare bulb vs an incandescent one. You explanation makes a lot of sense, so thank you again.
I debated for a long time about what to get for lights. I spent less than $100 on the setup, but made sure to get specific photography color corrected bulbs. I guess I should have gone with my instincts (you get what you pay for) and went with the strobes instead. If the bulbs end up being the problem, I think I will cut my losses and just get some strobes.
