After writing about the release of Mark Mann’s new signature LED kit with Harlowe, I found myself revisiting a question I hadn’t asked in years: if I were just starting out in portrait photography today, what kind of lighting would I buy?
For most of my career, I’ve worked with strobes. I learned on flash kits, studied the techniques of photographers like Dan Winters and Annie Leibovitz, and built a mental map around shaping light in those terms. That language of modifiers, ratios and sync speeds became second nature.
