From the course: Advanced Photography: Flash
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Strobes power
- Like hand held flashes, different studio strobes offer different power levels and, as you might expect, a strobe with more power can generate more light. As you might also expect, a strobe with more power costs more money, but more power in a studio strobe is not always better because if you use a strobe with too much power for the size of the room that you're shooting in, you may not be able to control your light. You might have too much of it. So how much power is enough? Unlike hand held flashes, you'll probably never see a guide number listed for a studio strobe. Instead, most strobes rate their power in watt seconds. You might also have seen joules listed. These are measuring the same thing. The most important thing to understand about the watt second rating is that it is not a measure of the strobe's light output. It is a measure of how much power can be stored in the capacitors of the power pack. The actual light output is more complicated because it's affected by the…
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