Bring your speedlights into the middle of your umbrella

SMALLRIG Cold Shoe Top Handle

What has always annoyed me is that my speedlights are not in the middle of my umbrella. But what is that, I still have a Smallrig camera handle in my camera bag. On the handle there are some threads for spigots and some cold shoe adapters That’s great. So I get the flash in the middle of my umbrella.

Low Cost Gear

Now, finally, I have found two cheap solutions to mount my studio flashes.
One, to mount it to Alutruss with a Half Coupler.
One, to mount the flash near the ground with a floor stand.
First, I drove to Cologne. There is a small company called “Abelz Filmzubehör” they offer various Spigots.
They also can build custom models for you. The most used way to mount a Studioflash is a 16mm spigot.
I bought two spigots with 10 mm internal thread.

I took one of my Clamp’s which already have a 10mm screw.I only had to turn the Spigot on the screw.

Then I grabbed an old Warning triangle, tore off the foil and the reflectors. I drilled a hole in the middle, and mount the Spigot on the Stand.  And ready… here is it:

making of Merry Christmas 2009

I set up a Striplight Softbox with Grid, mounted on a Starlight500.
I put the flash on a stand over us,50 degrees down for hair light.
The Softbox also creates a little spill light for the background.

One Starlight500 mounted with a BarnDoor and a yellow gel,
straight up under the hole of the Box.
I call it the “Pandora Box Light”.

Third Studio Flash with a snoot for the lighting of the outer box.

Camera controlled remotely, you see the remote in my hand 🙂

Here is the Lightingdiagram:

LightingSetup-TIA5668

klick on picture to enlarge…