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    Thursday 31 May 2012

    the power of umbrellas....

    31 May 2012
    Mohammadpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    this blog post is about some geeky stuff... so genuine family fun this time.... yea, sorry to disappoint.... but we do have fun of some sort.... the geeky sort.... this blog is more about technical stuff than other things....

    today we talk about one of the most common light modifiers... umbrellas.... umbrellas are one of the cheapest light modifiers and easy to carry, which makes umbrellas present in the hands of almost all strobist photogs.... its a no-brainer... you have to have it even if you use it much less often than some of its more illustrious light modifier brothers and sisters... but umbrellas are also some of them most under-utilised pieces of light-modifiers too... may be because its easier to get a better light modifier than trying to squeeze all the juice out of it.... yet, its always worth trying to make the best use of the things you have in your hand... it pushes your creativity and makes you more confident about possible less-than-ideal situations....




    to start off, it was our intention to push ourselves... we decided to do exactly what is more difficult to achieve with umbrellas... umbrellas are a nice way to soften light, but a lousy way to control light.... and that where we decided to concentrate our effort... we squeezed the juice out of the umbrellas and made them do the seemingly impossible stuff... some of these lighting scenarios are easier to achieve in a large open space with very poor light conditions... but if we say that you have to achieve these in a more confined space, you have to scratch your head for all the ideas....




    we used shoot-through and silver reflective umbrellas for this exercise.... we used go-bo's and also did various combination of the two types of umbrellas.... for one shot we used an extra reflector to throw back some light from below... we could use another umbrella for this as well.... bit can be questioned then, why we would need the umbrella to do it when a reflector can do the job just as nicely... and another umbrella would mean another light as well... anyway, we were happy with the outputs we had been able to squeeze our of the two modifiers.... don't forget to give your feedback on this....



    and anyway, we're planning to conduct a workshop shortly on exactly this topic.... how to get the best out of umbrellas... if you feel interested to join, don't forget to leave your feedback here.... and stay tuned for the workshop declaration in our dedicated "Idea Workshops" page:
    follow us in Twitter or Facebook to updates about workshop dates and other details...

    lots more to come.... :)
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