Home ·· News Room ·· Prints ·· Licensing ·· Gallery ·· About Us ·· Contact Us ·· Articles ·· Services Conversion of a Calumet 36 inch Silver/White/Black studio umbrella Updated February 16, 2006
	I purchased the Calumet silver/black/white umbrella to augment our current Photoflex white studio umbrella. With a reflective umbrella, I can feather the light rather than just diffusing it.  For studio shooting, the ability to feather the light is very important as it's really the only practical way to control how the light falls on a subject from an umbrella. The design of the Calumet umbrella has great potential because it can be used as a highly reflective white umbrella with the silver/black backing added or it can be used as a diffusion umbrella with the silver/black hood removed.  Since I own a Photoflex 30 inch diffusion umbrella, there was no reason to purchase another.  However, if the Photoflex umbrella was just the nice reflective material on the black backing, it would be perfect.  Plus, it comes with a nice nylon carrying case with a velcro closure, much better than the cheap clear plastic holders that most umbrellas seem to come with. With a simple modification, you can get a highly reflective silver umbrella.  It seems that most silver umbrellas just aren't all that reflective, with more of a matte finish than a foil finish. It just so happens that the Calumet 36 inch umbrella reflector has this surface.  So rather than purchase an expensive reflective one for $100, you can have one for $32. All it takes is ten minutes with a razor blade and you'll have your highly reflective silver umbrella. Begin by removing the silver/black cloth off the umbrella.  You just pull the little nubs off the end of each umbrella spoke.  It's designed to do this.  Now you begin by cutting the Photo flex threads that hold the white material to outer part of the umbrella spokes, all ten.  Then cut the threads that hold the white nylon to the middle of each spoke.  You'll then have the material only connected to the top cone of the umbrella, as in the above image.  I found it easier to cut the material from the cone from the bottom rather than the top.  You can't just tear the material away because you may break the spoke ring and then you'll have a $32 pile of junk.  Now you'll have the parts as shown below. Make sure to be careful not to bend any of the spokes because you'll ruin the umbrella.  They are only C-channel and fairly strong when attached to the white material but by themselves they're quite weak.  Now, just shove the top of the umbrella skeleton back through the hole in the sliver and black cloth and line up the spoke caps to the umbrella spokes.  Carefully stretch the cloth and place the caps back on the end of the spokes. Now you have a highly reflective 36 inch umbrella for $32.  You say that you've found a highly reflective silver umbrella for that price?  Good for you!  This is the only umbrella we've seen with a near-flat reflecting surface rather than a matte silver cloth finish at this price.  Below, you can see the huge difference in reflectance between the white nylon with a silver background and the silver background itself.  There really is no comparison. The primary reason to do this is when you are bouncing light out of a reflector from a flash head, you lose light, sometimes a lot of it.  You want as much power as you can get because you can always ND filter your flash head but you can't coax more power out of it than it can give.  The quality of light will then be your primary concern.  Light reflected from the silver will much more specular than from the white nylon.  This is an unavoidable consequence of a more reflective surface.  I found shooting with a diffusion Photoflex umbrella that I couldn't control the light at all and that's the impetus for this conversion project.
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