The Weakest Link (in your lighting setup)

I was out recently photographing, our apartment's very cool and manager, Julie Anderson:

Julie - Portrait shot for Strobist Boot Camp III - #1

Things were going great until we tried to move to a new location, and I was breaking down my lightstand: the umbrella holder snapped off of the lightstand!

At first, I thought the brass interconnect, lovely called the "brass monkey" by many, had broken. As it turns out, it was an el'cheapo $1.50 1/4" to 3/8" thread converter I had used to marry some disparate parts together, which broke.

Unfortunately, this curtailed our shoot, but thankfully, I was able to get some shots I liked.

Lessons learned:

• Backups! - ALWAYS have backups.
• K.I.S.S.  - If I'm hacking together different parts together to save $8 on the correct part, I'm probably setting myself up for some pain down the road. Time to re-evaluate and clean up my setups. 

Thanks to Julie for taking time out of her busy morning to model for me!

~ W.