CONTINUOUS LIGHTING: BACK TO THE FUTURE

At one time, continuous lighting was the only choice for photographers wanting to craft their images with artificial light. Masterly Hollywood portraits by George Hurrell and images of the who’s who of the mid-20th century by Yousuf Karsh serve as classic examples.

Then, early strobe practitioners came along, such as Gjon Mili and Harold Edgerton, who used the fractions-of-a-second flash durations to freeze action imperceptible to the human eye, while Herman Leonard could keep film grain down and light intensity up in smoke-filled nightclubs recording the who’s who of the jazz world. And while the moving-picture world continued on with “hot lights” for obvious reasons, strobes, because of their far greater power output, became the norm for stills.

But with the advent of LED lights and other 21st-century technological advances, photography has gone retro,