Studio Strobes question - how much is enough?

Question

I bought 2 strobes GN150 with softboxes... is this powerful? I am shooting for family portraits - max group of 10. anyone out there have other recommendations?

I have Canon Digital Rebel 350D
2 Strobes of 200W each
1 Strobe of 110W
My studio room is approx 10x10 with 6.5 feet height in my basement

Answer 1

Assuming you are shooting in a studio I imagine the stobes will be somewhat close to your subjects thus the light will be fairly saturated. If this is the case 2 150w/s should do the trick. However, there are a few things that should be taken into mind. The first being that since you are dealing with 10 people you probably want to eliminate as many rows as possible so that you dont have to worry about the focus and depth of the image. Granted I dont know what kind of camera and lens you are using, as well as the iso film or digital setting you are using but there could be some potential problems that I can forsee. For example say you have 3 rows of people, it turns out that you can only focus on maybe 1and a half row, and the last row is a little blurry(which is why I said watch out for the depth of the portrait) so you decide to stop down your camera to say f16 to get things in focus(unless you are using a 4x5 camera in which I would say you could scheimflug the image to get everything in focus thus leaving the camera open at full aperture). So you stop down but the problem is now that the image is underexposed and it will take 3 pops of the strobes to get a proper exposure, but since these are people and cant stand totally still for three pops of the strobe you end up with ghosting. I think to answer this question better I have to know more about your setup, location, type of camera etc...by the way I can should mention that if you are shooting with digital, digital cameras tend to be more senstive to light than film so that 150w/s strobe has a bit more power than what the strobes are said to be. However I have to say that regardless of power 2 strobes may not produce the desired lighting that you want, sure it may be able to light up your subjects, but is it appealing, then again you should be ok. Best wishes with your shoot.

Answer 2

Thats an ok start, I use 3 100 ws lights for a few yrs, but am looking at a new set of 300 ws lights (more working distance from subject)

Eric