Umbrellas

1. They are extremely cheap
2. They take up hardly any space and are very easy both to store and to transport.
3. They can produce soft light - or at least shoot through umbrellas, which can be placed close to the subject, can.
   
4. The softness or hardness of the light can be controlled easily, simply by moving them closer or further away, which changes their size relative to the subject

Before we move onto example shots, i need to explain that umbrellas are made in two distinct types - shoot through and reflective.

With shoot through umbrellas, the umbrella is positioned between the flash head and the subject and the light passes through it to illuminate the subject - or at least about 60% of it passes through, the remaining 40% or so is reflected back, which can cause its own problems which we'll talk about later.

The big advantage of shoot through umbrellas is that because they are between the light and the subject they can be placed as close as we like, which means that they can produce very soft lighting if required.

Then there are the reflective umbrellas. As the name suggests, the light is reflected from them, and for this to happen the flash head needs to face away from the subject, and because of this the umbrella can't be placed close to the subject and so can't produce such a soft light. The big advantage of reflective umbrellas is that the light from them is fairly controlled, i.e. it all goes towards the subject.

Reflective umbrellas come in various 'flavours' - plain white, silver and gold. White ones produce the softest light, silver ones produce a harder, more specular light and gold ones produce a similar quality of light to silver but of course the light is coloured gold, which can produce a very pleasant, warm look to the right subject.

Let's look at identical shots with each umbrella. In each case the umbrella was as close as it could possibly be to the subject and was to the right of the camera and above, at about 45^o

I think the first thing we notice is the differences in the colours, especially between the shoot through and the others.
Why has this happened? Well, all light modifiers can affect the colour of the light but the shoot through umbrella used here is new and pure white, that red/magenta cast must have come from somewhere else - but where?
Well, the ceiling is painted black and the walls, which are quite distant, are white so I think that we can rule them out as the cause of any colour pollution. This leaves us with the floor, which is made of pine and that must be the cause of the problem - and it can be a very real problem with any type of light modifier and especially shoot through umbrellas, simply because the light from them bounces around the room and will reflect any colours that exist.

The next thing we notice is that the light is softer. That's because it's closer to the subject and therefore bigger in relative terms.

And the other thing we notice is that the overall contrast is lower - and the cause of that is lens flare, with a little of the light bounced from the umbrella striking the lens. If you're going to use a shoot through umbrella as a key light, in front of the camera, then you you need to guard against flare. In fact, I guarded against it myself, using a very high quality lens fitted with a very efficient bellows type lens hood, which is far more efficient than the type supplied by camera manufacturers.

And the main difference between the two reflective umbrellas is that the silver one has produced a slightly harder, more specular light.

This is how I set up the shot of 'Louisa' (my well behaved mannequin head).

Louisa was sitting with a white wall 10' behind her.The wall was unlit. I leave the backgrounds unlit in this series so that you can see how much effect the light has on the background, and so that light reflected from the background doesn't interfere with the lighting on the subject. If backgrounds need to be lit they need to be lit separately, because they are separate subjects.

The light was placed very close to the subject, in fact it was just 18" away from her in this shot and you can see the part of the umbrella in the top right corner of the shot.

There is no 'right' distance or position for a shoot through umbrella, but if you want the lighting to be soft then it needs to be close, because soft lighting is a product of a light that is large relative to the size of the subject. And if you want 'wraparound' lighting then it needs to be both large and close, so that parts of the subject that are not directly facing the light still get lit by the large area of the umbrella.

Some people like to put an umbrella each side of the subject. This is fine for area lighting, say of children who won't keep still, but it produces very flat lighting. In these shots, I've used just the one umbrella as key light and I've placed it about 45^o to the right and 45^o above - a fairly typical position, although there are plenty of other positions that can be used too - as with most light shaping tools, place it wherever it produces the type of light that the shot needs.

Sometimes, a single umbrella is all that's needed but some kind of fill is often needed to create more balanced lighting but without destroying all of the shadows that define the shape of the face.

So in this shot I added an on-axis fill, which is a fill light (in this case I used a large softbox) positioned just behind the camera.. A fill light in this position places light on all the parts of the subject seen by the camera.  I decided that the ideal fill ration here was 1 stop less than the key light. That's a subjective choice of course, and you can make the fill light as weak or powerful as you wish.

Because fill lights add to the overall amount of light reaching the subject, the shot needs to be re-metered. The exposure with just the keylight was f/11, now it's f/11 decimal 4, which is about f/13.

You can see that the fill light has lightened the shadows quite nicely without weakening them to the point where all of the shadows have been lost.

And you can also see that some of the light from the fill has reached the background and lightened it. The reason for this is that the light from the fill is quite a long way from the model (7') and as it only has another 10' to travel before it reaches the wall, the inverse square law hasn't eaten up all of its power.

Of course, we don't always need to use a fill light at all, and in this shot I've positioned the 5-in-1 reflector to kick a little light back into the shadow areas.

Reflectors are extremely useful (and cheap!) but when the key light is placed as close to the subject as it is in this shot, they aren't very effective because of the effect of the inverse square law, which means that the light from the reflector is travelling much further than the light from the key light.

I've placed it as close as I physically could without getting it into the shot.

Let's add a hairlight now.

I used a honeycomb fitted to a standard reflector (a snoot fitted with the supplied honeycomb would have done much the same job) and I placed it behind, above and to the side of the model to put just a splash of light onto her hair.

Because the hairlight is only producing a very localised light it doesn't affect the overall exposure. This is what it produced.

But we don't have to use a honeycomb or a snoot as a hairlight, because reflective umbrellas make excellent hairlights - their big advantage is that the light is spread over a much larger area than the light from a honeycomb or snoot, so is 'safer' when the subject is moving around - we'll move on to umbrella hairlights later.

Let's move on to the white reflective umbrella. Again, I've placed it as close as physically possible but because it's facing the 'wrong way' the closest I could get it was 42" from the subject, which made the light smaller in relative terms and which created harder light.

You can see tht the shadow transfer edges are more clearly defined and that the light doesn't wrap around the subject like the light from the shoot through umbrella - but because the light from the reflective umbrella is much more controlled, there is very little spilled light and no lens flare.

And here is the same umbrella, with the 5-in-1 reflector positioned to reflect spare light into the shadow areas. The fill from the reflector is more effective now because although it is exactly the same distance from the subject as when it was used with the shoot through umbrella, the light is having to travel further from the reflective umbrella and so there is less reflected light loss due to the effect of the inverse square law.

Although the shoot through umbrella loses almost half of its effective power because of the light that reflects from it instead of passing through it, the fact that it can be positioned much closer to the subject means that it delivers more light.

When I changed to the white reflective umbrella I had to increase the power by 50% to maintain the same aperture.

Our final umbrella is the silver reflective, which is used in exactly the same way as the white (or gold) umbrella. The only real difference in result is that the light is more specular, which can be either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending of course on the effect you want to achieve. The highlights on the forehead, cheek, nose and lower lip are clearly brighter.

Although the silver reflective umbrella produces a harder light, it is actually less efficient in terms of light output than the white reflective umbrella. I needed to double the power setting in order to maintain the same lens aperture, making it 1.5 stops less efficient than the shoot through umbrella, with both types at the closest possible distance from the subject.

Adding our 5-in-1 reflector (which itself has a silver finish) to lighten the shadows has created a light without deep shadows but which is still interesting.

I mentioned that reflective umbrellas can be used to create hairlights and that the big advantage of using an umbrella is that the light covers a much larger area than a honeycomb or snoot - but although it's effective with the shot on the left, sometimes lighting a large area can be a disadvantage too, especially when the subject is wearing light clothes .

This shot was taken with the umbrella fully open, but one of the options open to us is to partially collapse the umbrella; not only does this create a smaller, more controlled circle of light, it also creates an irregular light that can make the hair look very attractive.

This shot shows the positions of the key light, the 5-in-1 reflector and the hairlight, both fully open and partly collapsed.

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