I personally would heavily recommend against continuous lighting. The first time you see just how sharp your shots get with a strobe light, you will understand. There is a very definite and quantifiable and qualified difference in the sharpness of strobe versus continuous. And any one who really understands lighting will know this and it can tend to peg you as amateur. Not that hot lights don't have their place, but it does tend to mark you as non pro. that 10,000th of a secoond flash freezes even the slightest hand tremor, as well as any other movement based blur.

Lighting is rated by bulb wattage for hot lights, but for light output for strobes. And that depends on capacitors and other circuitry inside your flash. The rated power of a 600 watt second flash shows a top limit of , well, 600 watt seconds. And the strobe tube is not a real light bulb, but a flash tube designed to create a very intense and short duration burst on incoherent light from a high voltage power source.

So consider this, Continuous lamps are rated in watts (which is a rate of power), with no time period defined to determine total energy. So by definition, if we use a shutter speed time sample of say 1/100 second, then the total energy available to us from a 500 watt continuous lamp is (500 watts x 1/100 second) = 5 watt seconds. In contrast to continuous lights, a small studio flash unit rated 160 watt seconds will give us the full 160 watt seconds of energy instantly, regardless of what our shutter speed may be. Note that 160 watt seconds is greatly more energy than the 5 watt seconds above, and will enable you to shoot at shorter durations as well as lower ISO settings. The benefits should be obvious.

This means that in the long run, what you learn on hot or continuous lights doesn't necessarily translate well into strobe. Seriously, there is a significant reason that the overwhelming majority of pro's use strobe. even your on camera flash gets rated at around 75 watt seconds. And the idea of renting to get a handle on what you want is a fabulous suggestion. Even with a light flooded apartment, strobes can help you out. That short duration burst of light just really works that well.

Go with mono's and a wireless, and even practice on the cat if you have to, to get proficient with the lighting.. You should have some friends who just want to goof around and "play" model. Utilize them, your shooting will most definitely benefit from that. One idea you might try is to rent some gear and play with it, or buy some used gear. Take it and shoot both ambient light as well as strobe. Explain to your client you want to "artistically experiment", and see how you like the two sets of shots. Most people will be flattered that you consider them good enough to try to push the envelope fashion wise. And you just might surprise yourself and get even better shots than you expected to.