Stobist: On a Stick

I threw this together this afternoon in anticipation of some house guests for a party tonight. I used some old PVC I had in the garage, plus a brass 1/4 inch machine screw. The threaded bit is 1/2 inch long. I drilled a hole slightly smaller than the 1/4 inch threads, through the splitter piece on top. There was just enough screw on the other side to thread into a standard Nikon flash stand.

Simple enough. A little vinyl dye spray paint could clean it up a bit and make it more aesthetically pleasing. For the moment, I think it work out nicely...We'll see. I want to try and engineer a set of legs that fold up insde the PVC pipe that can be removed to make a short stand out of the stick. That may be next weekend's project.



The results are in: Looks good to me....

 

James, thats a small softbox made by Lumiquest.

 

Where or how will you position it?
How will you trigger , the flash? CLS, SU-800, PW?

We, me and my assistant, will often use a spare monopod or stick to mount an SB-800. Then my assistant can hold overhead, it gives wonderful fill.

A great idea.

We will use PW, or Su-800 to fire, for our work we must be sure of getting the shot. Pw's are the most reliable.

The thing attached to Strobe, looks like a small soft box, Lumiquest?

 

CLS to trigger it...Either the Pop Up flash with some fill, or the SB800 if I've been eating my Wheaties and can hodl the whole thing with one hand.

I could easily disregard onboard flash and just use an SC-29 if I wanted to; it's long enough.

 

So you walk around with it?

I would position it in one place, a corner or center of the room, either bounce it off wall or ceiling, or let it just fire out into room.

You probably would not need any other flash or strobe, just depends on size of room. It actually works a lot like using studio lights. I have used 3 sb-800's on curtain rods, throwing light off of a white ceiling, the light is perfect.

I have a friend, who uses a quantum on a pole, he is a wonderful wedding and event shooter in NYC. The pole light along with a camera mounted flash, gives great ambient, and he does not need to overexpose his ground shots. In the big rooms he shoots in, it provides wonderful light depth, so you don't have the strobe shutting off from the reflection off the subject and wind up with black holes in background.
Great idea.