a makeshift reflector holder

An important disclaimer: what I have described below is how to use your equipment for purposes it wasn’t designed to fulfill. Doing what is described below is entirely at your own risk and you’re responsible for any damage it may cause to your equipment, people it might hurt, etc., etc. You don’t have to do what I’ve done unless you decide so.

If you also happen to often work with reflectors and don’t always have a handy assistant around this is probably going to be useful for you. Below I’ll describe a quite decent DIY solution/substitute for a reflector holder on the field – it’s cheap, it’s stable and you most likely have (almost) all the ingredients.

What you’ll need

• A good tripod (mine is Manfrotto’s 055XPROB)
• Ball-head to go with it (Manfrotto 486RC2 here)
• A short spigot adapter (Manfrotto 119)
• A clamp which can attach to the above adapter (mine’s some no-name cheap thing, but it’s solid)

So, the basic idea is that you use your tripod as a “do it yourself” reflector holder. Thanks to its wide spread the tripod offers a lot of stability so you probably won’t need to use sand bags or other weights to keep things where you placed them. Because you’ll be “holding” your reflector vertically and not horizontally there are some limitations as to what and where you can reflect. Yet, don’t despair – if you have a tall tripod you can still get pretty decent results at eye height and retain most of the stability.

Below are some photos with brief explanations to help you understand better how the whole thing works. It’s really simple.

This is our Manfrotto tripod. It’s aluminum, doesn’t weigh much and has a lot of potential when it comes to spread, control and stability. You could probably pull this off with a cheaper tripod, too but I wouldn’t try it with one of the small entry level versions.

Then comes the ball-head. This one is quite essential as it allows you to fine-tune the position of the reflector. You don’t always have to tighten it all the way if you do a lot of small adjustments while shooting – it saves a lot of time. I’m not a fan of the 3d heads and I don’t own one to tell you how it would behave, but as long as you have the same clearance and options for adjustment – any one would do.

This is the ball-head with the spigot adapter mounted. This is necessary so you have where to mount the clamp. I’m sure that with different models you’ll be able to come up with different solutions to that, but this is what I already had so I used it. Just make sure that the spigot is tight enough into its place, so that the clamp doesn’t start moving around when the wind blows against the reflector.

And here is the whole big deal. The ball-head, the spigot on it and the clamp all fitting nicely and well tightened.

Now, a few shots showing the actual reflector being held by the clamp. Depending on the size and weight of your reflector you can manage to use it in moderately windy conditions. If you look a few shots below you’ll notice that the reflector isn’t actually held against the legs of the tripod. This means that when wind blows from the front it will stay in place nicely. If wind blows from the back, however, depending on its size and weight (again) the reflector might lift significantly. My temporary remedy for this was the photo bag – but it only works when the reflector is low enough. I suppose you could use two more smaller clamps to hold the reflector to the tripod legs. I’m still working on a quick and easily adjustable solution for myself, so if you have one in mind – let me know in the comments.

A nice option if you have a tripod with individually adjustable legs (ie. such that are not held together) is that you can tilt the entire tripod down to get a “from below” reflection – should you need such. The same tilt can also be used to bring in a reflection to a subject which is very low or on the ground.

Enough talking – here are the final few shots of the mod in action:

And the tripod tilted back for a different angle:

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