How to Set Up a Light Stand – Quick Tip

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Hi this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens we’re gonna talk about stands. Just your normal, everyday light stand. How to set ’em up and how to use them. There’s a lot more here than you realize. Let’s get started and see what we can do.

Let’s talk about stands. This is a universal stand by Kupo. I love this light stand because it’s very similar to a Bogen stand I used to be able to buy back in the eighties. It’s tall, twelve feet, and it give you a solid platform and it’s really good for heavy lights. It’s a fabulous stand. By far my favorite light stand. But let’s talk about how to set it up. There are two knobs on the stand. Don’t use the bottom knob. Don’t even look at that knob. It does weird things to the stand unless you know what you’re doing, in rocky terrain. Normally we use the top knob. It opens it right up. Now, as you set it down, don’t just plop it down. Find where the stand wants to sit. That will give it a nice even platform, make it very large, and give you a lot of support. You don’t want to just drop the stand in the middle of the set. There’s an angle of view on set, find it. Put two legs on that angle. That way it’s least likely to intrude on the angle of view or the camera angle.

Now we’ve got to raise our light stand. Don’t raise it from the bottom up. If you do that then when you need to raise it more you’ll have to bring the whole thing down and start over, because the top section is way up there. Start from the top. I don’t raise the top section very much because it’s a little flimsier than the others. So just give it a little bit. But now I know that with the next sections I can go as high as I want to go. This stand will go up twelve feet, which is fabulous. Another tip is to only turn the knob a quarter turn. If you loosen it too much when you get it up there and your light’s really heavy, you’re taking an hour to tighten the thing. And you can’t get it tightened. Just a little half turn. And a half turn to tighten. Half turn. Half turn to tighten. Very simple to do.

When you put the stand away, remember, don’t look at that bottom knob. Don’t touch that knob. Leave that knob tightened on the bottom, loosen the legs, pull it back together, and you have your stand. So there are a couple tips on how to set up a light stand. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.

-Jay P.