Double Power In A Pinch
There is an old saying that says necessity is the mother of invention. Necessity drove me to this little flash get up while assisting my friend David Higginbotham shoot a wedding. We were in a very large, dimly lit church shooting some pretty large groups. The Vivitar 285s bounced into umbrellas were not giving us enough light. In the blinding flash of a flash, inspiration struck and man did it hurt.
I quickly grabbed a pair of Nikon SB800s and set them to the SU4 setting so they would fire on optical slave. I then strapped them to the light stand just below the Vivitars. As you can see, you can also strap them to the umbrella itself using the other flash as a prop. This doubles your power per umbrella. If you are shooting with two umbrellas you are then getting four full power strobes bounced into umbrellas. You don’t lose the nice light an umbrella provides and you get basically double the power.
Since I first did this on the spur of the moment I have been able to use it for my photojournalism several times where I would have had to use direct flash in the past. The photos I have included in this post are not real good examples of photojournalism but they were shot for an education magazine we publish for the city school system and this is the photo they requested. It did need to meet the higher repro standards that the magazine has relative to the newspaper so some fill lighting was essential. The umbrella light was necessary so the double strobe set up was the perfect alternative. I am giving you an example with the strobes and without to show you the difference. Like I said, it is not the greatest example of portrait lighting I have ever done but the assignment and time of day conspired to make this pretty difficult.
You will find several situations where this lighting technique will help save your bacon. Maybe you need monolight power but don’t have a monolight budget. Maybe you have those precious lights but they are back at the office. Whatever. Give this a try. I am sure there are better ways to secure the second strobe and I know I have seen a double strobe bracket but, like the strobes you don’t have, it doesn’t help you if you don’t own one.
Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer
PS. Both photos are untoned so you can see the difference without any image manipulation from Photoshop.
I’m assuming the first photo is with the double flash umbrella, and the second is without flash?
In the new alignment, the photo on the left is the one with the strobing and the one on the right is the one with no strobing.