Shopping for Umbrella Accessories
Lighting umbrellas offer an elegant way to optimize the scope and intensity of the natural or artificial light in a scene. They work as light-shaping tools to soften, decrease, and broaden the throw of illumination to take the right shots. For more focused lighting, use parabolic umbrellas, which deliver light with less spill. Durable, inexpensive, and easy to use, lighting umbrellas are useful for photographers of all levels.
A range of umbrella accessories are available to enhance and extend your use of these essential photography tools, including flash and umbrella mounting accessories that fix your umbrellas securely in the optimal position. Umbrella diffusers adjust the reflective and diffusive qualities of the units and create ideal lighting solutions.
Flash and Umbrella Mounting Accessories
You have a number of options when choosing umbrella mounts. Most come fitted with studs, threaded inserts, brackets, and hot shoes to affix the umbrellas and other items such as strobes and light fixtures. A swivel adapter lets you fit light, flash, and umbrella on one neat fitting. You can find models with tilt handles and swivels for precision positioning. These lightweight, durable aluminum adapters offer a compact, flexible way to optimize your lighting setup in the studio or the field. Other versatile options include stand adapters with grip heads that house cutouts of varying sizes to accommodate accessories of different diameters.
Umbrella Diffusers
These slip over the open side of your umbrellas and work to add extra diffusion to the lighting and reduce output by 1 to 1.5 stops. You can find models that work with medium shallow and deep umbrellas. Their white, heat-resistant, translucent materials create a softbox effect. Diffusers are similar to umbrella back panels, which reduce unwanted reflected light. They tend to be white on the inside with black exteriors, and are available in several sizes. Attached with elastic bands, they come with drawstrings for closure and transform your translucent umbrellas into softboxes.
Other Umbrella Accessories
Other popular umbrella accessories include umbrella grids that fit onto light modifiers such as parabolic reflectors. These metal or plastic disks focus light in specific directions. Use them with softboxes, beauty dishes, and backlights, and stack them to increase their effect. Lighting grids are generally model specific, although you can find generic items.
Discover the vast selection of lighting and parabolic umbrellas and accessories including umbrella brackets, umbrella diffusers, grids, mounts, and more at B&H Photo and Video.