When it comes to photography in a studio, you mainly want to focus on the lighting. Professional studio light sources usually use two ways to get their lighting, you can get a kit with a flash head and a power pack, or you can get a monolight kit. A head and power pack kit has a flash head and a small power pack that acts as the generator that supplies energy to the flash head. There are two kinds of power packs, symmetric power packs and assymetric power packs. Symmetric power packs split power equally between multiple flash heads. Assymetric power packs allow the user to vary the power supply to different flash heads. Monolights, on the other hand, are compact substitutes for a power pack/flash head combinations. Their size limits their power, but they are often useful for their portability. If you’re shooting outdoors or with complicated modifier setups, you are going to need a lot of power to overcome the sun or the light loss caused by the modifiers. Head/pack systems have a big advantage in the power department. Whereas, if you’re shooting indoors or inside your studio, monolights will probably be more than enough for regular work. There are also light modifers if your lights are too harsh or not what you want. The most common types of light modifers are umbrellas and softboxes. Reflecting umbrellas produce a diffused and soft light due to the larger size of the reflecting surface. They are mounted in such a way that the strobe light is actually facing away from the subject or model. Light flies from the strobe head hitting the inside of the umbrella and then bounces back towards the subject. There are silver-lined, white, and gold tinted umbrellas. Silver-lined umbrellas are the most efficient and can focus light more narrowly than the other types. White umbrellas offer a wider spread of reflected light, and gold umbrellas produce a warm tone.
With these lighting tools, you can control your own light weather it be indoors or outdoors. You can create any type of lighting from side lighting, to full front lighting with a kicker. One technique you could also do it adding color to your lights, which adds color to your photos. With time and practice you can adjust, change and modify your light perfectly to have your subject stand out exactly the way you want them too. The freedom between each light source is very helpful for a photographer as you can make everything low light, high light, or mixed.