If your soft box is larger than your umbrella, the results will be softer. This is why small or micro soft boxes are not very effective, they aren't much bigger than the bare flash. This is true unless your subject is very small and your soft box is very close to your subject.
You will see some small differences if the reflector type is either specular (like foil or shiny metal) or diffuse (white panels or cloth).
A soft box should always be more efficient than any non silver backed umbrella, the umbrellas loose a lot of light to pass-through. That may help softness to a degree (or even help fill in the shadows) if the light that is passed through the umbrella bounces of a white ceiling. It will have shadow-filling properties.
You can create a HUGE umbrella effect by bouncing your flash of big sheets of foamcore. Doing this you can create the effect of a huge bank light.
One thing that hasn't been covered here is how you bounce your flash off the umbrella. It is important that the flash be wide enough or far enough away so that it lights up the whole umbrella. If you don't, you won't be getting the maximum softness.
All for now,
Mr. Bill
bud kuenzli wrote:
As always, I can only speak from my own very limited experience. I have used flashes and umbrellas and bounced them and shot through them. I still do but I find I really need to keep them close to the subject. I haven't tested and recorded numbers. I may be entirely wrong in my sense of things. I don't have any real small softboxes so it also may simply be that my umbrella's are smaller and therefore work better with my flashes than my single large softbox but most softboxes - I think - have a diffusion panel inside and when you shoot into that to ensure a wide even coverage from the box you end up with less light then when you bounce from a sliver umbrella. When I resort to my flashes with umbrella I am trying to go light so I may also be trying to use my STE2 and then I may well be forced to shoot through the umbrella if the STE2 can't "see" a bounced flash, which is common. In three hours I have a home family portrait commissioned. I could take my flashes I guess but when people pay good money for portraits to be done I try to use the best gear for the job. When I have to do multiple location shots I am more likely to use my flashes just because they are so much faster to setup. They are very useable but in my case I only have two of them whereas I have four strobes. I know of one photographer who uses something like 5 sets of flashes for wedding banquets and such to great effect. I agree that a white shoot-through umbrella -might- be less efficient than a softbox, but if the softbox has a diffusion panel it might not be the case. Somebody with a similar sized softbox and umbrella could check that out. All my stuff is packed up this AM. I'm outa here in a short while and at THIS moment...it's time to make some coffee, get dressed and load up the car. 4 strobes, two barndoors, ND filters, two backdrops, six stands and too many cords.
* **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
