Best photography lighting kits

Photographic lighting comes in all shapes and sizes. This guide is here to help you find the best photography lighting kit for you. There are three different types of kit we're going to focus on here: plug-in studio lights, battery-powered lighting kits for shooting on location, and a constant photo light, or 'continuous lighting'. Flash is fine for stills, but LED panels can illuminate your video clips too. 

You can get great lighting effects with flashguns, but these eventually have their limits, both in power and range, and in the controllability and 'light shaping' effects you can achieve. 

For a home studio setup, or if you’re shooting indoors on location, there’s no beating the power and versatility of a conventional mains-powered studio flash kit. Top options include the Elinchrom D-Lite and Interfit Honey Badger twin-head kits, which are fairly compact and easy to carry around, yet quick to set up and simple to use. But they’re no use if you’re on location with no access to a mains electrical outlet.

A growing range of battery-powered ‘location flash’ kits are now available, based on the same kind of IGBT (Insulated Gate Bi-polar Transistor) technology as regular flashguns, but with similar power to a studio flash head. Supplement the kit with a dedicated hotshoe mounting trigger, and you’ll also get the bonus of automatic TTL (Through The Lens) flash metering and HSS (High Speed Sync) flash for shooting with fast shutter speeds.

The not-so-secret third option is to go for a constant light. The latest LED panels are relatively cool-running and give fairly strong output, although they’re much less powerful than a flash head or regular flashgun. Maximum output is measured in Lux, usually at a distance of one meter, and the quality of light is measured in CRI (Color Rendering Index). Plus points include a ‘what you see is what you get’ approach to lighting a subject and, when shooting video, constant LED lighting is perfectly viable whereas a flash head will be entirely useless.

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Elinchrom’s D-Lite flash heads and kits have earned a reputation for excellent build quality, ease of use and superb performance. The Elinchrom D-Lite RX 4/4 To Go is a range-topping kit that includes a pair of 400Ws flash heads, sturdy stands, a 66cm square soft box, a 56cm octagonal soft box, and a translucent deflector that enables a beauty dish effect.

The included EL-Skyport Transmitter Plus radio-frequency trigger enables users to adjust flash head settings remotely and has a range of up to 200m. Alternatively you can upgrade to the Elinchrom HS Transmitter, which also offers high speed sync flash. Alternative save modes include triggering from a flashgun, and ignoring any pre-flash pulses. 

Elegant and intuitive, the push-button control panel offers easy adjustment of power output through a 5-stop range, in 1/10th stop increments. Selecting proportional, full, low and no modelling lamp output is similarly simple, using a conventional 100W bulb. An auto-sensing cooling fan is built into the head. Output is remarkably consistent on a shot-to-shot basis, and power adjustments are highly accurate.

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If you're on a tighter budget, the best photography lighting kit for you is the Interfit Honey Badger 320Ws 2-Light. Taking its name from reputedly the world’s most fearless animal, Interfit’s Honey Badger head makes a bold entrance in bright yellow and black, with a strong maximum power rating of 320Ws – which isn’t far off the Elinchrom D-Lite kit at number 1 in our guide. It’s a bit more noisy in operation because the relatively small heads have cooling fans that run full-time, rather than just kicking in when the going gets hot.

The photography lighting kit we've chosen is the dual head option with soft boxes and a wireless remote. This enables you to adjust flash head settings and trigger them from the hotshoe mounting transmitter. The maximum range is around 90m, which should prove ample for most shooting scenarios.

Maximum flash intensity is a little down on the Elinchrom D-Lite 4, which isn’t surprising given that the Honey Badger has a 320Ws rather than 400Ws rating. At the bottom end of the range, flash output is more subtle than in the Elinchrom, equating to an aperture of f/7.1 rather than f/16 in our standard one meter test at ISO 100 (with standard reflector and no brolly or soft box). Recycle speeds are pretty much identical for both competing heads.

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The next photography lighting kit on our list is the Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL To Go Set, which is ideal for shooting on location. Traditionally, Elinchrom has stuck with conventional variable-voltage flash for its battery-powered heads. This offers optimum performance and color consistency throughout the output range. A downside, however, is that three variants of each head are required for standard, high speed sync and ultra-short-duration flash. 

However, the ELB 500 employs IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor) technology, as used in the other battery-powered kits in our guide. This makes all three options possible from a single head, plus automatic TTL flash metering.

Like the Phottix battery-powered kit (at number 5), the Elinchrom has a separate flash head and power-pack. The latter includes the control panel for making all flash head adjustments, and the two components are joined together with a heavy-duty cable. In the Elinchrom kit, the flash head is incredibly small and lightweight, yet still delivers plenty of punch.

Maximum power output in standard flash mode is the strongest of any battery-powered kit in our guide, although you can’t turn down the wick as much as with the other kits. An ‘Action’ mode gives an ultra-short flash duration of as little as 1/20,000th of a second, for freezing motion.

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Slightly larger and nearly a kilogram heavier than the mains-powered Honey Badger head (number 2), the newer ‘Unleashed’ edition runs on a rechargeable battery. Indeed, unlike the Elinchrom and Profoto battery-powered kits, you can’t run it from the mains, so you might need to add a spare battery or two to your kit.

Our chosen kit option includes two heads, batteries and mains chargers, two 60cm pop-up soft boxes and a sturdy backpack. The optional Interfit HSS TTL remote trigger is similarly great value. This, as its name suggests, enables TTL and high speed sync flash modes. Unlike with the mains kit, there’s no cooling fan here, which means the Unleashed edition is virtually silent in operation – a particular bonus when using its bright 2500 lumens LED modelling lamp as a constant light source for movie capture.

Although the 250Ws head gives less output than the 500Ws heads in our guide, this is the only battery-powered kit that features two flash heads rather than one, making it excellent value at the price.

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This Phottix kit includes a separate flash head and power-pack, similar to the Elinchrom ELB 500 (number 3 on our list). Again, they’re connected by a heavy-duty cable and the power-pack offers switchable standard or fast recycling speeds. The latter drains the battery faster but, in standard mode, you’ll get the same 400 full-power flashes as from the Elinchrom kit. A downside is that the battery takes three times as long as the Elinchrom to recharge, at up to five hours, and you can’t power the head from the mains unless you buy an optional AC Module.

The kit we went for comes with a single flash head, although two heads can be powered from a single power pack. Again, it’s similar to the Elinchrom in this respect, and you can adjust the power output of each head fully independently.

Performance is good overall but high speed sync isn’t available until you hit the higher end of the power range. Recycling time is near-instantaneous at most power settings, only slowing towards the very top of the range.

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Larger and 400g heavier than the standard Profoto B10, the new B10 Plus edition is twice as powerful, at 500Ws. Like the Honey Badger Unleashed (number 4), the battery clips into the head instead of being housed in a separate power-pack but, this time, you can power the head from the mains as well as from the battery.

The kit includes a head (twin head kit also available), stand adaptor, battery, battery charger and a padded carrying bag. The kits and accessories are pretty pricey, but on the plus side, all components are of very high quality. Rear-panel controls are simple and intuitive. TTL, high speed sync and freeze flash modes are available, and there's an iPhone companion app that links up via built-in Bluetooth.

The powerful LED modelling light is useful for stills and video capture and comes complete with adjustable color temperature. Recycling speeds are pretty quick, but battery life is relatively limited, at 200 full-power flashes.

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Next is our pick for the best LED panel: Rotolight's AEOS. Although it's nearly three times as expensive as the Manfrotto Lykos Bi-Color LED light (number 8 below), the AEOS is more powerful and has a few extra tricks up its sleeve. 

Good for stills, the AEOS really excels for video capture, with customizable fade up/down and a range of special effects including flickering fire, lightning, TV, strobe and blue flashing emergency vehicle lights. The bi-color LEDs have a 100,000-hour lifespan and, as with the Manfrotto, enable completely flicker-free output, this time with a color range of 3150-6300 Kelvin. Maximum output has a much higher rating of 5750 lux, albeit at a shorter distance of 3ft (0.9m). Twice the output is available in flash mode with zero recycle time, complete with high speed sync if you buy an additional Phottix Odin II RF trigger.

On the down-side, the basic kit only includes the circular LED panel itself, a mains power supply, a heavy-duty ball head and a filter pack. 

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An advantage of studio flash heads is that you can use modifiers like brollies, softboxes and honeycomb grids. Sold as the LM8 100W Monolight in the UK, and as the Studio Essentials 100W LED Monolight in the US, this Interfit constant LED monolight has a similar design to a mains-powered studio flash head and comes complete with a standard Bowens S-type mount. You can therefore attach the same range of accessories.

With a 500W equivalent light output and good 95+ CRI rating, the lamp has a daylight color balance. There’s no tungsten-daylight color temperature range, as featured in the other LED kits in our guide. The intensity of the output is dimmable with stepless control, via a rotary knob on the back of the head.

In our standard one-meter test, the power range equated to an aperture of f/2.2 to f/4 (1/60th of a second, ISO 100). We’re surprised that maximum output wasn’t a little higher, given the powerful 14,100 Lux rating at one meter.