diy background support/ 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’re like me and often have to shoot within limited space and you don’t want to give up your seamless background, I have good news for you. By accident I happened to put together what is now becoming my favorite background support tool. As with the makeshift reflector holder I only used items which were already in my legal possession. Yet, if you don’t have everything, here’s a list with the ingredients…

What you’ll need

• A decent light stand (can also be small and cheap, like mine, if you only use light backgrounds).
• A clamp which can attach to the top of it.
• [optional] A Manfrotto Lite-Tite adapter and a spigot (Manfrotto 013, which I already had from the backlite stand)
• Two [metal] strips which are long enough to sandwich your background in width; mine are aluminum (check the hardware store nearby). You can use other material, but I found these to be most durable, stable and easiest to store… And I already had them.
• Two simple workshop clamps which can be had at any hardware store.

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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.

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elinchrom quadra adapter mod

An important disclaimer: What you’re about to read and see is a modification of a product which is likely to break its warranty (should there be any) and as such is to be carried out at your own responsibility. Furthermore, if you damage whatever (the product, your tools, toes, nails, windows, etc.) while you’re trying to repeat what I’ve done – you’re the one who takes the full responsibility. You don’t have to do what I did unless you decide to yourself.

Alright, now to the point – you bought yourself an Elinchrom Quadra, the initial excitement has settled (or not) and you want to make the most of it (which is why you bought it in first place). The problem however, is that to achieve this you’re very likely to use it on modifiers larger than the optional EL Quadra Reflector Adapter is specified for. The first batches of the adapter which are still in stock at some smaller distributors just won’t hold, say your Elinchrom Deep Octa. People complained, Elinchrom came up with a solution – a new batch of adapters with improved rubbers, washers, whatever it is that they changed. The problem with this new one now is that it’s far too sticky. Tighten it up and then you’ll be doing the opposite (what appears to be) forever if you want to change its angle. And even then the adjustment is far from the quality of the Manfrotto/Bogen Lite-Tite Swivel (a.k.a. 026). I believe that swivel/umbrella adapter to be the best out there, albeit pricey.

There’s a few similar mods out there, but none seemed clean and simple enough for me, so I sat down one day and came up with the following.

Please, do read the entire thing and only then start working (if you choose to do the modification).

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