Here's the business end of a lightstand. The top piece, from the knurling on up, is made of brass. At the very top is a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread. In a pinch, you could use a lightstand as a tripod or you could use a tripod as a lightstand. But they really are quite different beasts. A tripod is much heavier and sturdier and normally has a head, either pan/tilt or ball, to allow the camera to be aimed. A lightstand is usually lighter, less rigid, and can be extended MUCH higher. Most of the length of a lightstand is in a single column, while a tripod has three legs that go most or all of the way to the top.
Though the lightstand has a threaded top, I have never used the threads. An umbrella clamp clamps onto the brass post immediately below the threads.
This lightstand is a Bogen/Manfrotto 3086. It's relatively inexpensive, available for around $40.00 mailorder. It will extend to touch the standard 8' ceilings in my home, with nothing attached to the top of it. It's plenty sturdy enough to hold any battery powered flash or a small monolight and umbrella indoors. Really heavy lights or outdoor windy conditions would call for a more robust stand, or at least placing sandbags on the legs of the lightstand to weight it down.
Here's an umbrella clamp. This clamp is a PhotoFlex Umbrella Shoe-mount Multi-Clamp. It sells for about $18.00, and comes with everything you see here, which is everything needed to attach a shoe-mounted flash or a flash with a tripod thread. There are two brass cylinders, each with 1/4-20 threads at one end and 3/8-16 threads on the other. One of the cylinders has male threads, and the other female. Either can be inserted at the top or bottom of the clamp. There's also an aluminum flash shoe, shown here resting on the brass cylinders, with female 1/4-20 threads on its base. Bogen makes a very similar clamp.
Here's an umbrella clamp attached to the lightstand. You can see how the clamp's lower handscrew is used to to tighten it onto the post. Both the top and bottom of the umbrella clamp have a similar arrangement to clamp onto a post. There are holes to allow you to insert a post in horizontally instead of vertically, though I haven't had a need to do so. The holes are shaped so that the clamp will tighten down on posts of varying sizes.
The lever in the foreground loosens or tightens the joint between the top and bottom, allowing you to tilt the top of the clamp at any desired angle.
This picture shows the umbrella clamp with an umbrella inserted, and with the flash shoe on the top.
The umbrella goes through a hole in the clamp, and there's another handscrew on the reverse side of the clamp, not visible in this photo, that tightens the umbrella into its hole. Note that the hole is angled up a bit on the side where the umbrella goes, so that the light naturally aims toward the center of the umbrella.
Here's the clamp with a flash firing into the umbrella.
The flash is a Sunpak 383 Super, a wonderfully versatile flash that does everything except TTL. The little cylindrical thing near the base of the flash, pointed our way, is a Sunpak slave unit. It fires the flash whenever any other flash goes off in the vicinity, thus making the whole operation cordless. I think sync cords attached to lights positioned high in a studio can be hazardous; you'll eventually trip over them, pulling a lightstand down and breaking something.
Note that the flash is shown swivelled around backwards. The controls on the back of the flash are facing the umbrella, while the front of the flash, with its sensor that controls the automatic flash output, is facing away from the umbrella toward our subject. You can use the flash this way to provide fully automatic exposure control without using TTL or a flash meter! No, the auto sensor doesn't need to be the same distance from the subject as the camera is. (If you were using an incident flashmeter, the way a studio pro would, the flashmeter wouldn't know or care about the camera-to-subject distance, only about the amount of illumination reaching the subject.) This method won't work terribly well for extreme sidelighting or backlighting, because the sensor will be viewing the subject from a different angle than your camera. It will always take care of lighting up its side correctly, but the side opposite the flash sensor may be left in the dark. But this super-simple system works well if you have the light positioned to provide nearly frontal lighting, with the light slightly to the side of the camera, or behind and above.
I trigger this flash using a little, weak, cheap Metz 20BC-6 flash unit mounted on-camera, with a bit of polyester #87 infrared filter material covering the front. Slave units are sensitive to infrared, but our eyes and (most) films aren't. The IR filter blocks all visible light, so my camera-mounted flash triggers the slave without affecting the picture. This is much more convenient than using a long sync cord that I would trip over.
The umbrella clamp is shown here mounted to a small tripod (Velbon Mini-F), with a 35 inch translucent umbrella, set up to light a macro shot. This setup works well as a portable macro light for giving soft lighting to flowers and such. The translucent umbrella can even be used outdoors in direct sunlight without a flash, just as a "scrim" or light diffuser to soften the sunlight.
Here's the macro shot lit by the above setup. Notice the soft lighting without severe shadows around Grumpy's nose. The white foamcore base he's standing on acts as a reflector to further even out the light.
Here's another macro photo taken with the exact same lighting equipment set up the same way as above, only outdoors. I took this photo of a lupine at noon on a bright sunny day when the natural light was at its harshest. I positioned the umbrella so that it shaded the flower from sunlight, and I turned the flash on full power. The flash power nicely balances the sunlit background, but the light from the umbrella is much softer than direct sunlight would have been. Also, the flash duration is short enough to allow me to take this macro shot without putting the camera on a tripod. This photo almost doesn't look like it was lit with a flash, which is precisely the way I wanted it.
