Showing posts with label Rui M Leal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rui M Leal. Show all posts

DIY: Umbrella Softbox Reinforcement

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Hello 2015!! Hope you all have a wonderful year with lot's of assignments and great stuff to photograph.

It's been quite a while that I did not post anything here on the blog, time flies and so do things. The world spins so quickly these days that you almost do not have time to spare on something else than shooting and family. For me traveling been an easy and wild ride that most of the time I don't have a moment to spare with the blog and unfortunately started to be left behind

Well, enough of this and the post I bring you today is an easy one and I been planning on writing on this for quite sometime, that the time has come ;)

More and more I've been traveling for assignments and getting myself with the same dilemma: Travel=Lightweight.

This means less things to bring onto a shoot and travel lighter either by having a small camera and lenses or having to choose lighter lighting gear and all portable. So I decided to give it a go to my Umbrella Softboxes I had in the closet, first because they are easy to travel with and also very quick to assemble on location, you just pop them open like an umbrella and there you have it a self contained softbox.

My last acquisition was the Phottix 90x90cm with grid, man this thing is BIG (not bulky), very portable and not very expensive. Excellent for on location shooting and travel! Not a BIG MAMMA but BIG and good for portraits and small group shots.

The thing is, I had already noticed that the interior of this type of boxes were not well attached together and can sometimes cause it to have disruption at the metal parts, either by letting her fall on the floor by wind blowing, by mistake or simply by opening it up and closing it to many times.

The 4 tissue attachments that came in are not suffice to make this thing steady (I also noticed the same thing on some other different sizes Umbrella Softboxes from this same brand).
Well they hold it together great but if you make some heavy duty work with it then this DIY solution maybe something that you would like to consider done to yours.

It's simply adding some inexpensive Nylon Cable Ties to join the 2 metal pieces together. This way you will have a stronger softbox, just by doing this DIY (Do It Yourself) on all metal bars that hold the softbox together.

Let's see how: 

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

First what will you need to make this DIY happen:

- Wire Cutter
- 24x White Nylon Cable Ties  (200mm) 0,50€ a pack of 50

You can choose whatever color you want on the Cable Ties, I preferred the white ones so it can be neutral, since the background of the box is silver and because visually it pops less to your eyes ;)

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Here is one of the 4 tissues that attach the metal bars together on each side of the softbox.

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Here you have one of the Nylon Cable Ties firmly securing the metal bars together next to the tissue one. 

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Grab the 2 bars together, here you have to take some attention for not letting the bars cross before you zip in the Nylon Cable Tie, otherwise you will end up with a distorted bar..

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Zip in the Nylon Cable Tie and move on to the next. I zipped in 6 Nylon Cable Ties on each metal bar.

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Here is the distance I've done of each Nylon Cable Tie near the top center shaft.

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

I did not push the zip too much on the closest to the center so it will not bend the metal bars. Tight it a little but not too much.


DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Here is another image of the distance between the first two Nylon Cable Ties.

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Cut the long edge of the Nylon Cable Tie and you are ready to go.

DIY Umbrella Softbox reinforcement

Here is the final image of my box.

The Red circles are the Nylon Cable Ties I had and the Green ones are the tissued ones that came already in the box.

I used 6 Nylon Cable Ties on each of the 4 metal parts of the box. I think 6 will suffice but you are able to attach more if you want to.

By making this simple DIY you are making the 4 metal parts more rigid and durable since now they are secured to each other instead of floating around. 

Hope this would help you on getting a more steady Umbrella Softbox so it could last a little longer.

Until next post... stay safe and THANK YOU for the support!!!

eBook: SimpleSLR Hands-On Photography Guides by Andy Lim


SUPER PROMOTION!! 

All SimpleSLR guides are going at half price (50% off) until September 7. Use the discount code WEDDING50

Andy Lim got started in photography after leaving design college in 1992, and has given several public talks on the subject of photography. He has a gallery of travel and landscape photography, which showcases his work, some of which have been published worldwide.  Andy conducts SimpleSLR hands-on digital photography workshops, from beginners to advanced levels.

He also writes useful and practical digital photography tips on his GoodPhotography.info website. Andy Lim is an accomplished professional wedding photographer. His brand, Emotion in Pictures, attracts clients worldwide with his unique flavor of wedding and portrait photography.

He bring this quite useful collection at an affordable price in an eBook format to help you master your speedlights.


In 3 different flavors that goes from Hands on Photography to Portrait Lighting and Portrait Recipes just as easy as 1, 2, 3.

This will definitely improve your photography and the way you handle your speedlights.

Hands-On Photography Guide
Learn to Take Better Pictures in 4 Hours

This is the electronic version of Andy Lim’s SimpleSLR PhotoClass. Having this e-book is almost like being there at Andy’s class, because the exercises that he takes his class participants through have been distilled here.

Unlike a regular book, it’s designed to quickly get you up to speed with basic photography principles, and provides a platform for you to experiment and refine your techniques. This is not another e-book on photography theory. Instead, Andy provides plenty of hand-holding using easy-to-understand conversational language.
Learn to take better pictures in 4 hours with this e-book!

We start off with a section of ‘Photography Exercises’ to familiarize you with the basic techniques of photography, using a show-and-tell approach. This breakthrough approach has been proven time and again to be effective in getting beginners to start experimenting intelligently with photography. Andy’s approach emphasizes deep understanding, and strives to make photography simple.

In the accompanying section called ‘Analyzing The Shot’ Andy takes you through his thought process with the photographs that he has taken, describing how he arrived at the combination of settings used for each shot, and further advice on how you can apply these techniques to your own photographs.

Lastly, great care has been taken to design an e-book that is easy to use, elegantly crafted and most importantly effective in teaching you photography. This e-book is horizontally laid-out, which maximizes your screen area for reading (instead of the portrait orientation that many e-books use). Paragraphs are narrower for easier reading, and diagrams/photos are used throughout to illustrate each point.

Preview this e-book by checking out a few sample pages. This will give you a good idea what to expect when you purchase it.




Portrait Lighting Guide


This series of guides aims to help photographers master a key aspect of wedding and portrait photography, which is lighting using a variety of methods: speedlights, available light as well as natural light.



Available light does not always mean natural light, because available light can come from any light source, including the overhead spot light used in a wedding ballroom.
View a sample page from this guide.



SimpleSLR Portrait Lighting is the anchor guide that will help you create portraits at the speed of light. I will show you simple lighting techniques that create powerful results, which can be put together very quickly using the most basic equipment. This is the first guide you should purchase as it contains foundation skills for using speedlights effectively.


Portrait Lighting Techniques On-the-job skills of a wedding and portrait photographer, revealed using an approach that is easy to understand. Available to you at prices that are a steal!

Efficiently Organized Pages packed with useful information and how-to diagrams. Illustrated with actual portraits by professional photographer Andy Lim.

Less Is More Contrary to popular belief that more pages are better, SimpleSLR digital photography e-books get the point across with fewer pages.

Elegantly Crafted Photography Ebooks Landscape format PDF e-books designed to read well on your screen. Works on any computer or Ipad. Print them out if you like!


Portrait Recipes Vol.1
Indoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 1 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in indoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.


Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal portrait photography lighting techniques that include:
  • how to solve indoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
  • change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
  • how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
  • quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
  • portrait photography with speedlights
With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!




Portrait Recipes Vol.2
More Indoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 2 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in indoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.


Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal lighting techniques for portrait photography that include:
  • how to solve indoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
  • change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
  • how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
  • quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
  • portrait photography with speedlights
With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!



Portrait Recipes Vol.3
Outdoor Portrait Photography

In VOLUME 3 of the 3-volume companion guides Portrait Recipes (available individually or as a bundle), various portrait scenarios in outdoor portrait photography are illustrated, and 8 different detailed lighting setups are revealed.
 
Detailed diagrams showing placement of lights (be it speedlights or available light) accompany each scenario, with EXIF settings shown, and my thought process described.


Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

These are the 8 scenarios in this volume of Portrait Recipes. Each scenario comes with its own set of challenges, and I will reveal lighting techniques for portrait photography that include:
  • how to solve outdoor portrait photography lighting challenges on a case-by-case basis
  • change the look of the portrait easily without tedious post-production
  • how a speedlight-lit portrait compares to one that was shot entirely with available light
  • quick guerrilla-style lighting techniques that deliver results with a basic set of equipment
  • portrait photography with speedlights
With these tips, you can create natural looking photography with flash, and confidently tackle any lighting situation during your next portrait or wedding shoot!





Hands-On Photography Guide
Learn to Take Better Pictures in 4 Hours

This is the electronic version of Andy Lim’s SimpleSLR PhotoClass. Having this e-book is almost like being there at Andy’s class, because the exercises that he takes his class participants through have been distilled here.

Unlike a regular book, it’s designed to quickly get you up to speed with basic photography principles, and provides a platform for you to experiment and refine your techniques. This is not another e-book on photography theory. Instead, Andy provides plenty of hand-holding using easy-to-understand conversational language.

Learn to take better pictures in 4 hours with this e-book!



We start off with a section of ‘Photography Exercises’ to familiarize you with the basic techniques of photography, using a show-and-tell approach. This breakthrough approach has been proven time and again to be effective in getting beginners to start experimenting intelligently with photography. Andy’s approach emphasizes deep understanding, and strives to make photography simple.

In the accompanying section called ‘Analyzing The Shot’ Andy takes you through his thought process with the photographs that he has taken, describing how he arrived at the combination of settings used for each shot, and further advice on how you can apply these techniques to your own photographs.

Lastly, great care has been taken to design an e-book that is easy to use, elegantly crafted and most importantly effective in teaching you photography. This e-book is horizontally laid-out, which maximizes your screen area for reading (instead of the portrait orientation that many e-books use). Paragraphs are narrower for easier reading, and diagrams/photos are used throughout to illustrate each point.

Preview this e-book by checking out a few sample pages. This will give you a good idea what to expect when you purchase it.


Enjoy this great set and get them all while they last...


Lenstag Aims to End Camera and Lens Theft

Nowadays with so much gear floating around and also with lot's of other eye of the beholder peaking around the corner the streets are now less safer than before and when carrying your gear you MUST HAVE an insurance to cover it at.

Your Precious!!!

They are never safe even if insured, and when you lost them and get stolen you rush to foruns and friends databases to try and keep track to them.

It's always a pain and in most cases you will never get them back, even after spending several hours reporting them to the police and insurance company.

I know that most of the online databases where you could mostly try to find your gear by serial number (Flickr or Google) aren't our best friends but then came Lenstag.

Well you can say puff!! it's an online free service and no one would care about this.

Well let me explain you something!!

Lenstag was created by Google engineer Trevor Sehrer and is an online equipment registry that makes it easier to report and track stolen cameras and lenses.

Let’s take a look at how the service works. It starts with a simple one step sign in/up form. Enter your email and password, and you’ll soon find yourself looking at a main registry in which you can list out all the gear you own.

 

After you sign in to your account you will your account. At this moment you will not have much there except a link to Share your gear list with your friends, that is very useful and you can customize as you please in the settings area.


Let's Start to add gear. You can register any gear you would like but some are already in there, for the most used gear anyway. As you start to type a list will show you the options, but if your gear is not in the list you can add it manually.


The same for your lenses and other accessories.


Here is a list of some gear I set and are now ready to be verified by ticking the blue icon or removed by clicking on the red trash icon.


After you have registered all your gear online, it's time to verify if it's really yours.

This may be the part where you will back away just because it will take you a little longer to have all your gear photographed.

Don't get yourself carried away by this step, this will really make a proof the gear is yours and is a great safety precaution to have it registered. Not like on Canon CPS or Nikon NPS where you can have all your old lens and cameras even the ones you have already sold so that you can have that Platinum membership.

Don't be LAZY go and take pictures of all your registered gear and make this happen ASAP!!!


If you have sold some gear or want to transfer it to someone else this is also possible, just follow the steps.


Then if you have some stolen gear that was already registered you can report it stolen, just that simple.


This is the message that will pop up after you report it stolen. Once this report is filed, your gear will be marked as stolen in the Lenstag system.

For example, a photographer buying a lens on Craigslist will now have an easy database to query for figuring out whether they’re buying stolen wares. Police departments and pawn shops can also use the Lenstag registry for easy lookups.

In addition to providing the information through a Lenstag search, the site attempts to make the stolen gear report show up in Internet searches. Each stolen piece of gear has its own public web page that lists it as a stolen item.


And you can also check the online gear that was already reported stolen. This way you can buy your 2nd hand gear on ebay or somewhere else with "some" safety. I say "some" has this will not contemplate for the moment all the stolen gear that are out there but it's a good starting point.

This page is indexed by search engines such as Google. What this means is that you won’t need to do any special searches on the Lenstag website — a simple search on Google for a serial number and a keyword (e.g. “stolen,” “lenstag”) will do.

Larger businesses have already begun partnering with Lenstag in order to keep a handle on their gear. These include two large equipment rental companies, LensRentals and BorrowLenses, who are now utilizing the system to reduce theft and speed up equipment recovery.

There is another place where you can look for stolen cameras and we talked about that in this Lighting Mods article "Stolen Camera Finder, helps you find your camera".

eBook: The Beauty Collective

PhotoWhoa project came out with another great Ebook featuring some of the best beauty photographers out there.

Frank Doorhof, Anthony Neste, Jenny Woods, Kristian Schmidt, Luke Schneider, Michael Monaghan, Michael Zelbel, Nick Saglimbeni, Noah Sahady and Zim Killgore.   
All together to teach you the best in their craft.

Learn from the best in the beauty photography industry

What you will learn form each one of them:
- How to Get Phenomenal Photos From Your Model Shoots with Frank Doorhof
- Taking Pictures of the Most Beautiful Women in the World with Anthony Neste
- Get Angry and Make Art... Never Stop Creating with Jenny Woods


- Swimming with Sharks and Capturing Beautiful Women with Kristian Schmidt
- How a College Boy Shoots High-End Commercial Campaigns with Luke Schneider
- Beautiful Women in Beautiful Seattle with Michael Monaghan

- Shoot Amazing Glamour & Beauty Photography with Speedlights with Michael Zelbel

- Retouching Magazine Covers and Shooting Celebrities with Nick Saglimbeni
 - A Once Shy Kid Now Takes Photographs of Stunning Models with Noah Sahady
- Getting Extremely Creative with Your Photography with Zim Killgore


Just imagine all this information just with one click and FREE for a limited period of time. Go grab them while they last.

Download it directly from PhotoWhoa here.

Also do not miss other great instructional content from PhotoWhoa here and be amazed!!