Original subtitles

To control our light.

We obviously need to get it in the right position.

And we do that through the use of lighting stands and supports.

So what I'd like to do is run through the most common lighting stands and

supports that you're likely to encounter

and give you more information about how they work.

Let's start off with the smallest and lowest lighting supports.

First,

this is a floorstand.

Now floorstand is very simple, just folds up like so,

and opens up sits on the floor and allows your light to be mounted onto

the spigot at a very low position, so you can guide the light upwards or in a

background, etc.

Now while we're talking about spigots, the spigot

is the common attachment

that is used for most lighting stands.

The spigot comes with a 38th and a quarter inch

screw thread on either end, and they're designed to lock into

the fixing on the lighting stand.

You sometimes find the spigots in a brass material as well.

The next step up from

the lowest floorstand would be the low stand.

And I've got two types of low stand here,

one which is quite interesting, which allows for this connector.

So it's actually a floor stand with an extension pole.

So it turns your floorstand

into a low stand by attaching like so, and then all needs to be tyned and then

allowing the floor stand, sorry, the low stand pole to be extended

to create slightly different heights.

This one, which is a complete unit,

is a low stand that folds away with tripod style legs,

opens up

and has

a reasonable

amount of extension.

So you can actually get the light up to a decent height above the floor.

So those are low stands.

While we're here, let's look at a specialty type of grip.

Now this is actually a sucker pump to attach to a gloss

glass surface.

So you can attach your light

again via the spigot, which will drop into the connector

and allow you to put your light onto here.

And then you can put your light onto a car wind screen, a glass window, or a

glossy surface by using the pump net mechanism and the angle

connector to angle the lamp head, however you want.

Let's move up now to the more basic, standard lighting stands.

So here we have a standard lighting stand,

folds up like, so they're quite economical,

fairly compact, as you can see.

And the height that we can get this one to

is

top extension

here.

Middle extension

here,

final extension

here.

So you can see this becomes quite tall, but it's not actually the tallest.

And also, this sizestand is a little bit unstable to be putting a heavy

light right at the very top.

So if you plan on getting lights very high, then you might want to go to a

slightly wider or stronger stand that gives you better support.

Or your next best thing for getting lights high is to then move onto

something like a giraffe boom, which we'll look at now.

So the giraffe boom is actually essentially one of these.

And this is just a large lighting stand on wheels.

Let's take a look at this.

First of all, if we undo this mechanism, and this one here, we can

actually fold the legs up

on this stand,

very compact.

So these are actually still quite portable.

And I take these out on location.

I can fit them in my car, no problem at all.

So we'll just get that back into position.

We'll lock that, and we'll lock that.

One other thing to note here is that you can undo the leg, one of the legs

on these so that you can angle these, if necessary, in case you need to get

these supporting at a slightly different angle or different position,

just for your reference.

This one is the 8

b u.

And it has an extension here.

So we can take this up quite high, and it's a lot more stable than a flimsy

lighting stand.

If you're getting stuff up very high,

the other bonus, as if we're working in a studio, the wheels allow you to move

your heavy lights around far, far more easily than having to lift and carry

the lights.

Now we mentioned that this is part of a giraffe boot.

And it exactly is that.

If we look at the giraffe boom you'll see from this point here, this stand is

exactly the same as that one.

The giraffe boom part is made up from this piece here and onwards.

And its purpose, as you can see here, is to get lights up high and out of the

way.

And if I undo the handle, you can see, I can raise the lights up very high,

very smoothly and very easily because of the counterbalance weight on the

other end.

That counterbalance weight can be slid along into different positions to

balance for whatever modifier or weight of light that you have on the end.

So in this instance, I've just got a hmi

on the end there.

And that balance is set up correctly.

So how does this mechanism work?

Let's have a look at this over here.

So the giraffe boom

consists of a series of poles,

which

section together.

And then with a

Allen key, you can adjust the connectors.

This one's done up a little bit too tight.

You loosen that one off.

And then that would allow this pole to secure onto that pole.

You could then secure another pole on the end of this, and you can keep extending

or shortening these giraffe booms as necessary.

Additionally,

you have this piece,

and this is the important piece.

This is the piece that slides onto the pole.

And this is the piece that then fits

into that lighting stand, allowing you

to adjust the angle of the giraffe boom,

as I demonstrated with this one.

And then this particular attachment allows you to

slide the main pole in and out at whatever distance you require.

So whatever extension you require for the giraffe boom can be controlled with

that.

One

here's the counterbalance weight, which you can see just secures onto the

giraffe boom very, very simply

like.

So once that's tightened like that there's no way for it to fall on.

If you need

even Greater height than that.

You have to move onto a large

wind up stand like this manfroto.

This is the o 87

n w.

And you can see here we've got a couple of screw connectors.

I can take this one right down,

and I can take this right up.

Let's see how high this one goes.

And as you'll see, this one goes very, very high.

So when I'm using lighting,

like a fluter,

a big frenel, or maybe the Powers, and I want them very, very high,

far away to simulate sunlight.

Then a stand like this gives me the ability to get the lighting right up

high, in position, or at any height between.

Now, obviously, a very heavy large lighting support system like this, they

do get a little bit more expensive.

And for security reasons as well, they have wheels that lock so that the light

stays in position.

Now, further to that,

I sometimes also

make my own custom modifiers

or attachments.

And you can see with this aluminium pole, I had my local metal workshop

create this

so that this can fit

into the standard size connector here, like so.

And now I've got a connector to put a light in here,

or a light in this end.

So in this particular case, on this lighting stand, I can have two lights

up very high

up in the studio

ceiling space.

Finally, the last type of stand that I'd like to talk about

are the c stands.

Now, c stands come in the low type, like this one, or in the standard

height, like this one.

I'm going to bring one of those c stands over

and we'll take a look at these.

So I have two c stands,

as I said, the short and the standard.

Now cstans are slightly different to lighting stands.

I'm just going to remove this piece.

I'm going to come back to that in a second,

and I'm going to remove the same grip and arm off of that one.

So we can just concentrate on the stands at the moment.

Now, c stands work differently.

They don't have the same

tripod fold up legs.

They have legs that collapse

together.

They're a little bit tricky sometimes these,

but they bend around and collapse together like so to form a flat surface.

C stands

are very, very strong,

much stronger than a standard lighting stand.

They can take a heavier load,

and I find they're far more stable.

They also have an adjustable leg.

So if you're working on uneven ground, not all of them do, but this one does.

If you're working on uneven ground.

Then you can raise up the leg to be sat at a different height, a different position.

The sea stand extensions,

again, go quite high.

And because they're a lot more rigid and a lot more solid,

you can get them a lot higher, a lot more safely.

So, again, they're better for supporting

heavier lights

or larger

modifiers.

But I still would recommend putting a sandbag

over the leg of the c stand as necessary.

Now, one of the most important uses for c stands

are using them in conjunction with a grip

and a grip arm.

Let's take a closer look at that.

So this is a grip.

Let me just take this grip arm out.

Here is the grip.

The grip attaches

to the cstan like so.

And then the grip arm

has

the ability to go through

the holes

on the grip,

like I've just done.

There there's different size holes for different size rods if you need them.

And then when you tighten the grip,

that locks

that arm in that position to form a very rigid, strong structure.

Now, the interesting thing about this

is this is actually very useful for lighting, because you can turn the grip

arm into a lighting stand.

If you look at the connection, here you can see, it's the same as a spigot.

And it will also allow you to attach a lamp head.

And in doing so, it means you've got a great deal of versatility

with where you can position your lamp head.

So you can extend the arm downwards, which means you can get a lamp head

right down low.

Or you can turn this into a mini boom by getting the lamp head over and in

different positions.

Now, depending on the weight of your lamp head and how

heavy it is, how compact, etc, you may need to be careful with the balancing

of your

boom arm.

As you can see, in this case, the c stand can adequately

support that light.

If you look at the leg system on a c stand, you can see that one of the legs

is longer than the other legs.

So it's always a good idea to be facing the leg and the arm in the same

direction to give the maximum amount of support.

Now, one word of caution with arms and grips

is some grips that you purchase

do not have the connector

for attaching a light.

They are just sometimes a plane connector.

Now the purpose of this particular one is not to attach a light.

This one is for use where you want to support an object, or possibly even

support a background.

So I could attach this grip

onto this head

and create a solid

rigid

position here.

And then I can have another one on another head and put a tube of paper,

background paper between it.

So if you want to use a grip

arm solution for supporting lights, just check that it has got the

spigot style connector on the end.

Now, in addition to

grips

and arms on c stands, you can also

adjust a c stand

to hold a small boom.

So in this case,

there is an attachment here

which allows

me to put a similar style to the giraffe boom, but actually attach it onto

the

c stand,

like so.

And now I can turn this

c stand

into

a small

boom

extension

for studio lighting.

In this case, this doesn't have a counterbalance weight.

And although I could use one of the counterbalance weights off of the

giraffe booms, you can actually just attach a

sandbag on the end, because there is a hook on the end for doing so.

So that about covers, all you need to know on lighting supports

and lighting stands.

Next we're going to look at grips, clamps

and accessories that we use in conjunction with these