How to Use Umbrellas in Professional Photography

Video Transcript

"Umbrellas are a great way to get that wonderful studio effect without spending a lot of money. With a certain umbrella you can almost get the same effect as a soft box has and it is a lot cheaper. So I am going to show you these two different kinds of umbrellas that I have so that you can see what I mean. This is a white umbrella, it is completely transluscent and you can use it to shoot directly through and it will give you a very soft diffused light. You can also use it to bounce the light back although because the surface is not terribly reflective it really diminishes the amount of light that is going to reach your subject. This is also a very small umbrella so it is good for just a single person portrait or a very, very few people because it doesn't cast a wide amount of light. This other umbrella I have is slightly larger and it has a pretty unique feature, first of all if you open it up, it is extremely reflective because it has got the white inside with the black coating to help keep the light from passing through so a lot of light is reflected back toward your person but it's a two in one situation, so I can just simply pop the ends off of this and then you can see I could very quickly have an additional white to shoot through which works great for diffusing it because it's larger it acts like a little bit of a larger soft box. These are often called brollies, as well, so if you see brolly, now you will know what that means."