Photographic Lighting Equipment: Umbrellas & Reflectors

Video Transcript

"This is Mark Bowers from Bower's Photography in Utah, and this segment is called Photographic Lighting, Umbrellas and Reflectors. I'd like to show you a little bit about umbrellas. I usually like to add a reflector to the flash tube. It increases the light. Flash tubes are usually....come with their own reflectors, and we use an umbrella to soften the light. And this is just a regular umbrella with a reflective side on the inside. And we just put it in the reflector's...in the umbrella slot, and it's turned around backwards. Then we raise it to the height that we need it. Other things we use are hand-held reflectors. Silver sides are useful for adding a lot of light. White sides are useful for direct sunlight, when you don't want the light quite so harsh. I use gold ones for creating a golden kind of light, maybe a sunset type of color. I use different sizes, big ones, little ones. This one has a little bit of gold and silver mixed in. Let's see. The reason that it's important to use these, they're called light modifiers, they modify the light and the direction. The sunlight from outside comes down from the top, and it's not really good to light someone's face. What you want to do is light someone's face, and especially get light in their eyes. So this is why we use reflectors to light...especially for portraits."