bounced flash

Qarik

Okay Tim Kampinen..I bought and read through Neil's book. It was a good read. A lot of it was review and reinforcement but there was a couple of points that I really picked up on. By the way if a book can give me even just a couple of aha! moments then I consider it worth reading.

The 1st thing it reinforced and explained well was the flash compensation vs exposure compensation when in manual mode. His advice to overexpose the meter to get whites to be white and under expose the meter to get blacks to be black really hit home. The aha! moment came when he was talking about tonality and histograms. When reviewing the histogram of shot with something white in it..then look for the leading right edge of the histogram and adjust that to be shy of clipping. Now I understood histograms previously ... but only in theory and I only adjusted exposure when it was clipping. His example provided that information in just that right way to "click" in my brain and give me physical reference point in the histogram vs the framed shot.

As a consequence of meddling around with exposure compensation..it got me thinking about how I shoot and post process. Note I have always had my EV set to zero. I got to thinking... in the majority of my post processing, I rarely, if ever adjust exposure negatively. In general if I adjust exposure it is almost always MORE exposure, not LESS. So I decided to set my exposure compensation to +0.3EV as my baseline. Get it right in camera for less editing but also one thing that had always bothered me was underexposed skin tones that are pushed in post always looked a bit muddy to me. I think this is because you simply get more data with a bit of overexposure vs underexposure. So perhaps both issues will be solved to some extent with this new baseline setting.

Lastly..bounced flash. I have been a fong sphere user for a while now. While it provides good even consistent light, it is a bit flat. While I don't plan to give up on the fong sphere..neil's bounced flash definitely has some appeal in that it can give you more directional lighting. I do think it is more useful in posed or semi-posed shots rather then true random candids.

Anyhow I had black foam snoot for SB800. It turns out this full snoot on the SB800 worked very well as the 1/2 snoot on the SB900 that was pretty much teh same as the modifier neil was using for his bounced shots. The 1/2 snoot basically blocks direct light from the flash to your subject when bouncing. So I took it for a whirl.

Okay so these shot are no pieces of art but I do like the directional lighting in them:

1)

2)

3)

pathfinder

With the Nikon system you do not have to bounce the flash by pivoting it on the camera, but can actually set it off camera against a wall and trigger it wirelessly via CLS. Indoors with white walls this will work very nicely as you described. I do this at family gatherings a lot in the EOS system.

The range of tones a silicon sensor can store is approx 5 -7 stops - maybe 2 stops over and 2 stops under exposed. If you divide your histogram into 5 or 6 steps horizontally, you can think of the far right as white, and the far left as black, and the middle as grey. You just have to be careful and remember and RGB histogram may not be describing accurately what is happening in each of the R,G,B channels. You can fry one channel, like red very easily shooting red flowers, and still not blow the RGB histogram. - That is the reason I always use the R,G,B histogram rather than a single white histogram.

Nice looking family!

adbsgicom

Nicely done!
I've been working on this, and am getting some better results in candid/random situations as well. Not 100%, so were I getting paid for something, I might be a bit hesitant, but I'm just doing stuff around my daughter's school. I'm getting better at moving the flashhead around and getting something close to what I want.

Neil notes in his blog that using the 1/2-snoot does put a big drain on your batteries since you are losing a ton of light in the bounce. I've found that when I can use the exposure lock (preflash before the exposure) I seem to get better results than just letting the auto-preflash do its thing. Not sure why that is (on the Canon system).



I'm heading to Neil's seminar this week in Austin, so hopefully I'll get a few more "aha" moments on Tuesday....

Tim Kamppinen

Ah, welcome to the dark side! I haven't read Neil's book but from what I know of his website I'm sure it's great.

The problem with setting up your flash to bounce of a wall, off camera, (as pathfinder suggested) is that you lose control over the direction of light, unless you are going to tell your subjects where to stand. If people are moving all over around the room, bouncing on camera lets you get whatever direction of light you want on the fly. It can work well for lots of things but to me it's pretty limiting for event shooting.

adbsgicom

In my case above, the flash is camera-mounted and firing up and right with a half-snoot on it. The general premise of Neil's book is that you can keep your flash camera-mounted and bounce where you want while roaming.

In one shot I did outdoors toward evening, I had my wife stand behind me and off to the side and bounced it off her back (she was wearing a white top). This diffused the light nicely to remove the shadows from my daughter.

The biggest problem with bouncing is that the light picks up the color of what you bounce off of. So white ceilings are great, while taupe walls yellow the light.

Tim Kamppinen

adbsgicom wrote:

The biggest problem with bouncing is that the light picks up the color of what you bounce off of. So white ceilings are great, while taupe walls yellow the light.

Custom WB ftw!

Scott_Quier

Tim Kamppinen wrote:

Custom WB ftw!

Or a WB tweak in post, especially if one shoots RAW

adbsgicom

But sometimes the walls don't match other light and you get odd fall-offs so you have to do clever filtering effects in PS. For example, if you have pink walls and tungsten light you now have reddish flash and yellow ambient.

Went to Neil's workshop yesterday (worthwhile time and $$ for me). While we were waiting on some gear, we started just practicing some bouncing in an alcove with the models. There wasn't anything behind us to bounce (large open atrium space) and the spot we were toying with was lit with an overhead tungsten light. The ceiling were off white, but to my left and right were some burgundy colums. If I tilted the flash a little to far to the left (or right), I picked up a bunch of red in the light and the mix with the tungsten wasn't correctable (since the light falloff wasn't even between the sources). If I cropped for her torso I could have a reasonable exposure with WB. With the bounce a bit more forward, the off-white ceiling worked well with the tungsten light (which was slightly underexposed to reduce the harsh shadow).

Qarik

adbsgicom wrote:

But sometimes the walls don't match other light and you get odd fall-offs so you have to do clever filtering effects in PS. For example, if you have pink walls and tungsten light you now have reddish flash and yellow ambient.

Went to Neil's workshop yesterday (worthwhile time and $$ for me). While we were waiting on some gear, we started just practicing some bouncing in an alcove with the models. There wasn't anything behind us to bounce (large open atrium space) and the spot we were toying with was lit with an overhead tungsten light. The ceiling were off white, but to my left and right were some burgundy colums. If I tilted the flash a little to far to the left (or right), I picked up a bunch of red in the light and the mix with the tungsten wasn't correctable (since the light falloff wasn't even between the sources). If I cropped for her torso I could have a reasonable exposure with WB. With the bounce a bit more forward, the off-white ceiling worked well with the tungsten light (which was slightly underexposed to reduce the harsh shadow).

yeah..so this is why I am not giving up diffusers which throw some light forward. At best Neil's techniques are situational and may take some test shots...though the lighitng can really be worth it.

marikris

I'm still reading Neil's book (I got distracted right when he started talking about FEC and laid it down for a bit), but from what I gathered, he's not very particular about where he bounces the flash. Is this true or am I imagining this bit? I'm trying to remember one of the picture examples toward the end where he was bouncing off buildings and one of them picked up color. But honestly, it's been a while so I'm probably making these things up.