Photographers moving beyond "natural light" toward studio lighting usually start out with continuous lights.
It's not a bad idea, as it is a more "what you see is what you get" approach that helps you see the effect light placement and modifiers have before you hit the shutter. Continuous lights are also a necessity for anyone shooting video.
One of the most economical ways to get a light set up is to use the clamp lights you find at home improvement stores. They're the lights in metalic reflectors that have a clamp you can attach to a stand, shelf or other object to position the light.
However, one of the limitations of the light is that they only take one light bulb, and finding bulbs with high enough lumens for a reasonable shutter speed can be difficult. And if you are using halogen bulbs, you're going to run into a wattage limit on the lamp as well as overheating issues.
But there is a way to boost the light output without turning the studio into a sauna or risking an electrical overload.
For starters, go with LED lamps. They produce the same amount of light for a fraction of the energy, which means they don't heat up as much. That comes in handy if you need to put a diffuser or color gel on the front of the light. Growing up, I can remember a few lamp shades that were damaged because they got too close to the bulbs.
LEDs also come in different color temperatures, so you can get daylight-balanced lights or go with tungsten and set your camera to the precise color temperature, saving you a bit of work in post production.
But you still have the issue of just one light socket in the lamp. But there's a way around that, and I have to give credit to The Frugal Filmmaker, Scott Eggleston, for this idea.
The Home Depot and other hardware stores sell twin-socket lamp adapters. They screw into the socket and give you two light sockets, allowing you to put two bulbs in, doubling the light output.
In my setup, I use brooding lamps, which offers both a larger reflector as well as having a 300-watt rating, giving me more than enough margin for safety. In the lamp, I have two daylight-balanced 100-watt-equivalent LED bulbs that throw out a tremendous amount of light.
It's a setup that provides a decent lighting system for both video and studio photos, whether you're doing portraits or just photos for your eBay/Etsy/Amazon page.
