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12 Mounting and Must-Have Lighting Accessories

Twelve must have mounting and lighting accessories. I've done this video probably like twenty times right now because I keep saying, mon applaud, I'm gonna stop saying munna plot and try to say mono pod anyway, the items that were talking about in this video are just really handy dandy thingamajigs to have with you, whether you're shooting on location or in the studio and so forth, let's start from the top. So in terms of what we're basically separated out in terms of mounting solutions, and we have kind of must have purchased anywhere type, letting accessories down here below. So starting with mounting solutions, we have a lot of extra tripod plates just around the studio. Okay, we have tonnes of spares, one because we lose them frequently and two, because pretty much everything in this entire industry uses the quarter twenty screw mount as basically the standard. Okay, so that means it's a quarter inch in diameter, and it basically has twenty threats, so we call them quarter twenties...

that's. What you find on your tripod plates. This is basically this standard plate that you'd find, like, say, on the ben row. As for mono pod with a video head, a cz well as man, photo tripods, and so forth, this is the arc, a swiss plate with they call these dp seventies you can pick these up off of amazon but this is just a standard artist was plate that's like ten bucks we have lots of these again around the studio because we use them with our our ben rowe our song not better are me photo tripods so we have a bunch of these why because not only they useful for mounting say your camera they also are incredibly useful for mounting lighting accessories so for example let's say I forgot my life stand but I do happen to have my ben rowe tripod and the better tribe has this little gone it liken grab this this is a basically the quarter twenty brass spigot okay so the spigot that I can stick right on to here to basically adapt us and actually what I'll do is I'll use actually fine so I can pop it right on to the end of my plate and now I can actually mount a lighting accessory right onto my tribe so I can put an umbrella bracket right onto this so it makes for a very handy kind of device just tow have around these tripod plates and so forth all right so let's talk about the next item which was the item that I just mounted on there which is this little brass spigot now these spigots are again one of those items that we just have like an entire bin of and we have a a whole variety of these different spigots basically so basically we have like usually most stands will have a slightly larger mount to it so it's basically a larger thread size and you could mount the spigots to that and then it adapts it to a quarter twenty so this is a female quarter twenty on this side this is adapting to a male quarter twenty on this side so for example I can use one these biggest to adapt this and now I can fit any quarter twenty if I wanted to I could put a camera directly onto this but let's say for example, this cheetah head that's cheetah three basically hot shoe little bracket this has a quarter twenty the bottom of it so now I can take that and attach it directly to my life stand so brass biggest are just handy handy devices because you're going to find that you often times are going to need to convert these little basically threads to whatever side that you need and more often than not it's gonna be to a quarter twenty so I would go ahead and pop this off next another handy dandy item tohave are these westcott umbrella brackets now you could buy general brackets for ten bucks they do tend to break, but like I said, I'm not gonna beat you over the head with this we buy the westcott thirty dollar ones because they're very well made and this is actually one of the cheap ones that we had lying around the studio that it has happened to grab that's alright, we're trying to finish breaking them all so we're going to start using on ly the westcott so this just mounts directly to any standard stand you can also put this directly onto a c stand you can put it wherever you want but it'll basically allow you to now mount a flash umbrella bracket you can put the west kind of paula soft box onto it or an umbrella under whatever you need thio onto this guy all right, next we have two little items here that are very similar in function we have a westcott triple threat and we have the cheetah three light hot shoes. So this is the cheetah three light hot shoe brackett and we have the westcott triple threat, which is a coal chute bracket. These two items are virtually identical. They're going to amount to a quarter twenty so basically could put them right here on the end of you know, a stand with a quarter twenty adapter and they're going to allow you to mount upto three flashes. Basically, we have three flashes on each side of these now the difference between these two is this one's thirty bucks and this one's fifty bucks why is this one fifty bucks? Well, because this guy is what we refer to as a hot shoe bracket, meaning there is a little port on here's let me to show you I can grab one of my hot shoot cables, whatever we'll grab this guy. Was that the guy that I wanted? Whatever it's not the cable I wanted, but it still has a three point five millimeters so I can put this onto a stand put three flashes onto this and then I can pop a cable right here in a three point five millimeter port. I can hook this up now to a pocket wizard and now it's going to fire all three flashes with a single pocket wizard, so now I don't need three pocket wizards for all three of these flashes. I just need one and it's going to fire all of them that's why it's, known as a hot shoe bracket versus this one is a cold chu bracket because it doesn't do any washing, triggering basically okay, so if you're using like let's, say, we're using the kotex meters plus those have their own built in radios. If you have a flash system as their own built in radios, you don't need this guy, but and so therefore just save the twenty bucks and get the westcott triple that, but if you do use pocket wizards, then grab this guy, because for the fifty bucks it's going to save you from having to have three pocket wizards, which is four hundred bucks of pop quiz there's basically. All right, so let's, go on to the next thing I have. Ah, logan who's gonna give me my proto ar fi speed ring. This is another fantastic little item. And we're going to show you a full set up with this later on in this chapter. But this is our favorite medium. Strobe ah, adapter ring. Basically. Why? Because we can adapt to any pro photo modifier. It fits onto a standard stands. We can put this onto a c stand. We're gonna put it on too. Just a little light stand like this. We can put it on anything. And it has this adjustability or flexibility and where we placed the flashes, so it'll basically this can accommodate, like the bolt v b twenty twos. These gigantic flashes, it can accommodate two of them, or we can also have smaller flashes, and it had this little tearing set up where basically we can place the flashes right here. I can adjust the height of them, and then I can adjust these in and out to make sure that they fit completely inside of the modifier, so it's a fantastic modifier and it's one hundred seventy five bucks but this is one of the items that you on li bai once you don't need to ever buy this again because it's extremely well made so there's certain item that we always say, you know, with an umbrella bracket find by a ten buck one because, you know, who cares if it breaks? Although it's still recommend buying something nicer gives who cares, like thirty bucks what's the difference and if it last unit saves you from a headache from him to buy it again, but with certain items like this, treat them his investments because these are things that you only by once, and they're going to stay and work for you for a very long time. Let's keep going. We have our ate clams. I'm going to give this back to you so doesn't sit here and block the entire screen. Thank you, logan, can I have your hands like in clampett? I'm just kidding you don't were you willing to do that? Yeah. Does that hurt? Like, uh don't get me in trouble for that. Okay, so a clamps ate clams you can pick up from home depot. These guys are two to three bucks apiece. They haven't been varying sizes, we have a few different size. This is the standard size we buy we also buy one smaller version because the smaller variance of this are fantastic for clothing so they're really great toe like pin your clothing and I forgot to pin my shirt right now because this shirt is too big okay? So with a clamps there just amazing devices for attaching modifiers to whatever you need to attach it to okay, so logan why don't you hand me one of these little go boz and let me raise this guy up just a bit so let's say that I don't have a specific stand that aiken mt well this guy to let's say I don't have like that reflector stand right but I do happen to have a light stand and I want to place this in a certain position I want to shoot through it well, I could just use my a clamp to just basically clamp right to the rod and now I'm good to go like these have taken hold quite a bit of weight so they're very, very functional and we'll have roughly eight to sixteen of them anywhere on set and we keep like sixteen, thirty of them inside the studio because we use them for virtually everything, so have a clamps they're very inexpensive, very worthwhile and definitely worth having. All right, the next thing this should go without saying is gaffer's tape gaffer's tape is a type of masking tape that is used on production sets why? Because it doesn't leave residue so I can take down cables. I can tape things too. I could take modifiers up to stands it's not going to leave residue on those stands when I pulled the tape off like say, duct tape would alright so fantastic little device bent as a little tape here. Okay, let's, go on to stand bags. Alright. And logan, while I'm on this, can you prep the diffusion cloth of black cloth? And I think we're all out of mylar way we can have those guys ready so a sandbag sandbags are again must have items, especially when you're dealing with larger modifiers when you're working outdoors. Even when you're working indoors, you need to place sandbags on the legs of your stand to make sure that they're not going to tip over. Now this is even more important when you're working locations like near the beach because anything that you set up any modifier they put up is gonna act like a giant sale so you might need multiple sandbags. Now this sandbag is currently empty is it just a spare one that we had lying around, but what I would recommend when you fill your sandbags is used like a double bag ziploc bag, so when you go to the beach when you, whenever you go somewhere to fill up your sand, right, put your scent into a ziploc bag put another ziploc bag in that and then place them inside of the zipper pockets on these guys why? Because when that sand you know, if one of those bags breaks, you don't necessarily want sam leaking out of these bags and it's also a pain the butt to clean up if you ever wanted, you know, take the sand out for some particular reason like it if you want you want to go and take these to a location shoot like you're traveling somewhere you're most likely going to empty this because why would you carry like thirty pounds of sand in here luggage so he'll empty this and then you know once you get there you'll fill it back up so having the ziploc bag keeps it just more clean it's just cleaner it's just a little this's just a tip from me to you from me my house to your house here you logan catch buddy that was a terrible catch. All right, let's, get the diffusion club. So we talk about this in the last video diffusion cloth again one of those things you can pick up at any local craft store craft cloth whatever store we mentioned it again here we mentioned the fusion cloth black cloth and mylar blankets because, well, they are light modifier so they could have gone in the last video but they're also not necessarily the most portable light modifiers the last video is really all about ultra portable light modifiers when you're dealing with stuff like this, you're going to need stands. You're gonna need a lot of stands to wield amount and to be able to hold these types of things up. And so they become not really the most portable solutions, but they're still fantastic light modifiers so we have a white fur diffusion and for reflection, if we need to we also have black. We have black anywhere let's. See, where is our black? Oh, we've hunger black over here to block off the back ground basically, but black cloth is again great for flagging flagging is when you need to stop light. We want light to no longer travel to certain areas of our image, so we'd flag off that light and also we have the mylar blankets so again, having that goble right there within my heart blinking, you can use it as a reflective source. You can use a whole number of ways or you can like, say, cut it up and make things like this like r d I y gobo so mylar blankets are fantastic again to have around the studio again. These guys are like ten bucks from home depot just very inexpensive items that you'll find are very useful when it comes to mounting life so when it comes to modifying lights, hopefully this video helped you all out. Let's. Go ahead and move to the next one now.