![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/flash\/bounce\/Christine-0188.jpg\")
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Deep into the busy part of the wedding season, the articles posted recently will be more wedding-centric than usual. But, as I’ve mentioned before, many of the techniques translate to other fields of photography.<\/p>\n
This photograph of a bride, Christine, received some very favorable comments when I posted it on Facebook. So I thought it might make a good topic here, as well as being a good recap of some essential bounce flash techniques. The portrait is quite straightforward in execution – the lighting was quite simple, but effective. It was also super fast to set up.<\/p>\n
Photographing Christine, the bride, in her parent’s home, she wanted a photo here at the bottom of the stairs. Instead of setting up off-camera flash, I knew I could shoot much faster and get similar results by bouncing my on-camera flash in a specific way. The trick to using on-camera bounce flash, is to bounce the light towards<\/strong> the direction you want your light to come from<\/a>. It’s not an efficient way to use flash since much of the light is lost. However, the light that returns looks very sweet indeed. And of course, I used the infamous black foamie thing<\/a> to shield direct flash from hitting my subject. I bounced the flash toward my left shoulder into the room behind and to the side of me. I wasn’t bouncing off a specifically chosen surface … but rather, a specifically chosen direction<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Here is the straight-out-of-camera image for comparison. <\/p>\n Aside from the Exposure and WB adjustment of the RAW file, I also edited out the wall and phone plugs and piece of carpet in the JPG that I generated from the RAW file. This kind of retouching of the JPG is something I only do for posting on the blog and on Facebook, and of course for album and print orders.<\/p>\n My camera settings were chosen such that enough of the ambient light registers to give a greater color palette to the image.<\/p>\n My WB setting somehow was set to Auto, which I rarely use. But since I shoot in the RAW format, it was of no consequence<\/a>. I finessed it in post. Simple. Bouncing my flash off the colored surfaces in this lobby, would also have affected any WB preset I might have used. Ultimately, I had to shoot in RAW.\u00a0In fact, I think I should create a new terminology for WB settings. What WB am I using? “Daylight RAW” … or, “Cloudy RAW” … meaning that my WB setting, while chosen, is a flexible setting exactly because I am shooting in RAW.<\/p>\n Something else to note – in bouncing the flash like this, above and to the side of me, there are no flash hot-spots in the wood. The light from the flash is now a large diffused light source. Soft and directional – just like we want the bounced flash to be.<\/p>\n In line with my recent observations that it is more interesting to use a diverse way of lighting our subjects<\/a>, here is a portrait of Christine lit by hand-held LED video light<\/a>\u00a0(affiliate<\/em>).<\/p>\n As always, the video light gives dramatic lighting with how quickly the light falls off to the edges. I had the Incandescent gel over the video light, and this gave that distinctive blue hue to the background which is daylight filtering in through the curtains. I commandeered the bride’s dad to hold the video light for me. Nice guy!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bounce flash for portraits of a bride Deep into the busy part of the wedding season, the articles posted recently will be more wedding-centric than usual. But, as I’ve mentioned before, many of the techniques translate to other fields of photography. This photograph of a bride, Christine, received some very favorable comments when I posted Read more inside…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[203,111,15,44,45],"tags":[495,510],"yst_prominent_words":[1835,2414,3779,1134,1158,1845,1844,1842,1478,1846,1847,3015,3014,1140,1838,1852,1520,9377,1141,2821],"class_list":{"0":"post-8725","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-black-foamie-thing","8":"category-bounce-flash-photography","9":"category-flash-photography","10":"category-video-light","11":"category-wedding-photography","12":"tag-bounce-flash-photography-at-weddings","13":"tag-bounce-flash-photography-tips","14":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8725"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49028,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725\/revisions\/49028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8725"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=8725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nClick on the image to see a larger version.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/flash\/bounce\/Christine-0188-duo.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/video-light\/Christine-0214.jpg\")
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Related articles<\/h2>\n
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On-camera flash modifier – the black foamie thing<\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/images\/flash\/bft\/bft_sq.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\tI use the black foamie thing (BFT) as a truly inexpensive flash modifier to flag my on-camera flash to give me lighting indoors that truly look nothing like on-camera flash.The piece of foam<\/strong><\/a> (Amazon<\/em>), can be ordered via this link. I cut the sheet into smaller pieces.
The BFT is held in position by two hair bands<\/strong><\/a> (Amazon<\/em>), and the BFT is usually placed on the under-side<\/strong> of the flash-head.
The linked articles will give clearer instruction, especially the video clip on using the black foamie thing<\/a>.\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"