Great photography depends on great lighting. As the technology continues to advance, so do the number of products on the market, often at dizzying rates. The choices can be staggering when it comes to photo lighting tools—continuous light, off-camera flash, strobes, LED light, monolights, ring lights, soft boxes, umbrellas and diffusers, beauty dishes and so on. How do you choose the tools and equipment that can help hone your style and look? Which tech innovations from lighting companies are on the horizon to help streamline your kit?

Rangefinder and WPPI recently hosted a webinar titled Fully Lit: A Conversation on the Future of Lighting to help you sort it all out. Here are some of the webinar highlights (as well as some interesting facts that emerged from our recent Lighting Industry Trend Report) with our two panelists: wedding photographer and Geekoto COO Hiram Trillo, and portrait and fashion photographer Tatan Zuleta, who is also a Paul C. Buff ambassador.

On Trend: What Photographers Want in Their Lighting Tools

What emerged from a recent survey done by Rangefinder and WPPI highlights what photographers want from their photo lighting tools and equipment, and from the manufacturers. You can download and read the full report here.

Photographers surveyed told us that portability, ease of use, power strength, and longer battery life matter most to them when purchasing products. Eighty-two percent of respondents prefer flash and 70 percent use off-camera flash for achieving a certain look. All agreed that learning how to use and perfect a look with any lighting tools under any circumstance is vital to creating a signature look and having a successful brand.

Lighting Up Your Brand Looks

When Hiram Trillo started out as a wedding photographer about ten years ago, he admittedly had no clue what he was doing. “I began first as a painter and studied the Masters to understand how they used light in a painting,” Trillo explains. “When I moved on to photography, it took a while to sort out my look and genre.”

Over time his style evolved, as did his lighting kit and setup. “Any time you walk into a wedding, it’s a blank canvas. As a wedding photographer, you can be working in a beautiful venue one day and a gymnasium the next; you just never know. That’s why I started focusing on how my lighting could be used to change the mood, the look of a venue, and the way I wanted my look and style to evolve.”

Trillo, a Rangefinder 30 Rising Star from 2013, likes to keep things simple, with a two- to three-light setup—one key light, a main light and “a third one depending on what the situation is,” he says. In the image below, what was supposed to be a lovely, weather-free outdoor wedding went awry when a storm hit “out of nowhere.”

Trillo used just two off-camera flashes—one slightly behind the couple at the fountain, and one that the groom is holding and pointing up onto the umbrella. “I wanted to bounce as much light as I could because I wanted to capture all those rain drops and this shot took maybe 30 seconds to take; it’s a very simple two-light setup and I also used a tilt-shift lens. That’s it.” In other words, less if often more when it comes to the lighting setups that make images like this one shine for Trillo and his clients.

Perfecting A Style

For fashion and beauty photographer Tatan Zuleta, lighting was a bit of a challenge when he was starting out in Cali, Colombia, because the equipment was twice the price and hard to come by. Nonetheless, the Paul C. Buff ambassador and lighting educator says he spent most of his early career trying to perfect his studio lighting as much as he could.

Today, Zuleta says his lighting style and his brand look are completely intertwined and the equipment he uses depends on the look he seeks to create. “Obviously if I do beauty photography, I need a beauty dish—thank goodness for foldable beauty dishes—and if I go for a more fine-art look, I often want more dramatic lighting, so I’ll use a strip bank or an Octabox, and another light to create or change the dimension of my shadows. But it’s always usually one light that I rely on regardless of the accessories and other equipment. I typically have one light and one modifier and that’s it. Photographers in general are getting more streamlined in their setups nowadays and that is a trend in itself.”

For the image above, Zuleta wanted to simulate window lighting, which is something he says photographers are often tasked with doing, so he took out his diffuser and pulled his light back so everything was soft. “I used a V-flat on the other side to create a negative fill because everything was so white. If I’m not careful in this type of situation, I lose contrast and depth and volume. My negative fill came in super handy to create the shadows and volume and density in the image.” Zuleta adds that he often finds himself experimenting to achieve looks like this one, which means he either pulls out “my massive, 7-foot Octabox, or I try to simulate the light I want using something different. In this case, it came down to using the right diffusion material and getting the right fall off.”

What’s Coming Next for Photo Lighting

Both Trillo and Zuleta agree that in lighting equipment today, everything is going in the direction of being “smaller and more powerful, more portable and efficient, and having longer-lasting batteries.”

Zuleta says that Paul C. Buff just came out with the Link 800 W/S Flash Unit, which incorporates high-speed sync and TTL technology. Over at Geekoto, Trillo says the company is currently working on is an LED strobe. “That is something we have been playing around with lately. I personally don’t use a lot of LEDs but there are some great things in the works.”

Adds Trillo: “What I think is so great about the industry right now is that old fogies like myself, we are used to what there is already. But then these younger, less jaded photographers are coming in developing not necessarily new techniques but rather a twist on old stuff—that’s where the future of photography lighting lies, that’s what will dictate where things are going: taking the basics on what photography was and is, and then pushing the envelope a little bit more.”

Don’t forget to watch the webinar here and our Lighting Trends report here. A big “Thank You” to our sponsors, Geekoto and Paul C. Buff.