105 — Four tips to improve your bounced flash photography

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #105 offers up tips on how to improve your bounced flash pho­tog­ra­phy. Bounc­ing your flash off of walls and ceil­ings is easy and really soft­ens the light which is often desir­able espe­cially in por­traits. You can also achieve a much more inter­est­ing light­ing pat­tern ver­sus direct on-camera flash. You can often achieve great results with min­i­mal effort and min­i­mal help; I often use bounced flash when I am shoot­ing alone and need a quick light­ing setup.

The images below of my wife Carmy were shot in about 5 min­utes against a slightly green wall in my liv­in­groom. The tones in the face and back­ground wall are sim­i­lar but not iden­ti­cal in all images and I delib­er­ately chose not to match them to see the sub­tle dif­fer­ences. These dif­fer­ences are due to the dif­fer­ent ways that the light bounced around the room. There were win­dows in the room but the day was cloudy and no direct light was shin­ing through the win­dows. Images are unretouched.

The image on the left shows direct flash. Note the harsh shadow on the wall and the rel­a­tively even light­ing on the face. The shot on the right, bounced the flash off the ceil­ing. The shadow is still on the wall but it is softer. The light­ing pat­tern on the face is less even but more inter­est­ing to the eye.

The image on the left used flash that was bounced off of the wall about 12 feet behind me. The image on the right used flash that was bounced off the side wall about 6 feet from me. Note the absence of any shadow on the back wall com­pared to the left image in the first set. When you try this for your­self make note of how far the bounced walls are from your flash. The far­ther the walls are from the flash, the harder the flash has to work and you may need to increase the flash’s output.

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Spin­rite - To recover crashed hard dri­ves
Photo pod­cast #4 — Fill flash
Photo pod­cast #47 — Flash sync speeds
Photo pod­cast #71 Portable flash

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