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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