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Wheres the best spot for the hair light when trying to avoid reflections?
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Anthony I just bought a couple of really cheap Chinese-made softboxes off eBay. I knew I was going to have to hack into them and rework them to get them to fit (and I thought there was a fair chance that they wouldn’t work at all and just get thrown away), so I didn’t get anything too nice or expensive. I’d usually recommend Chimera or Photoflex, but in this case I went the dirt cheap route.
Two observations about them…
1) They work well
2) I never use them.
After spending quite a bit of time taking the instruments apart and taking care to drill my perfect holes in them to receive the rods, I just rarely if ever use the softbox setup. The umbrellas are so easy and fast to use, that I just almost always use those instead. The umbrellas I have are big enough to avoid any spill at all, so in this particular case the extra control you get from softboxes really isn’t needed… at least not in the way that I use these particular instruments.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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That makes a lot of sense. Thanks a heap for the reply. Once again, very thorough.
One more question: where did you get the umbrella brackets from that you mounted on the lights? Do they have a particular name. I could just use a U-bracket and achieve a similar result, but can see that yours look much more polished and have the fastening screw.
Thanks again, mate.
Anthony -
Hi Anthony…
For the umbrella holders I bought and cannibalized a couple of these…
Most of these parts are discarded, I only used the umbrella holder part. They are mounted on my lights basically inverted from what you see here. I took that top shoe off, there are four little screws that hold it on. When the shoe is off, the flat surface that is remaining is what got screwed to the top, using tiny bolts through those four holes. I did sand on the surface with a belt sander to make it more angled so that the umbrella would point slightly down and the light would hit in the center of the umbrella. I also, of course, cut off the tab that fits into the baby pin holder.
So basically, the rig just uses the umbrella fitting of that piece of hardware, everything either above or below that was either removed, unscrewed, or cut off.
These are made out of that hard plastic that’s fairly easy to saw and sand.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Brilliant, sir. Hugely appreciated.
I’m sure, besides me, there are plenty of others who will find this info very helpful.
Thank you again for all of your responses, and all the best for the upcoming holiday season!
Keep well,
Anthony -
Todd, what size umbrella was that pictured in your shoot?
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Gosh, I couldn’t say, Brian… that shoot was more than a year ago.
We have bunches of umbrellas though, and while they are different sizes none of them are what I would call very small nor very huge. They’re mostly in the “mid size” range.
If I had to guess I’d way it was probably in the 30″ diameter range… maybe a little bigger. Happy to measure it if needed, but I won’t be back in studio until Monday.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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No need. I was pretty sure by the looks of the pics you posted they were 33″.
Thanks.
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