Hi, I'm Tony Northrup and for chapter 3 of my book stunning digital photography
I'd like to show you how you can use a bounce flash to improve your photos.
So, we have our model Chelsea Lipp here and I'll take a picture of her with just
natural light
So that's not bad, but you can see there's some kind of odd lighting on her
face and that's because behind me here
the floor is being lit by the sun and then that floor light is bouncing up and
kind of under lighting her and that's the lighting you'd use in a
horror movie. It's not the lighting you use for a portrait, right? So we want to
kind of take control of that lighting and add some front lighting or some nice
top lighting. So i'll try just turning on the on-camera flash here because this is
what everybody does and I'll take a photo with that.
So that definitely changed the lighting, right? But not necessarily for the better.
Now we have two kind of weird catch lights and all the flash did was kind of
added a harsh reflective light to her face with lots of ugly specular
highlights and it made this really hard shadow underneath her chin.
There's an easy way to make this much better and that's to add an external
flash, I have one in my pocket.
So I'm just going to put this on my camera and turn it on.
And I have it in fully automatic mode, so i'll just take another picture.
So it's better than the on-camera flash but it's still leaving a really distinct shadow under
her chin. The improvement is because I just raised the light source a little bit
away from the camera lens. So, now it's a little bit higher and that just gives a
more pleasing shadow but we can raise the light source even higher just by
doing this.
Just bounce it off the ceiling. And now the whole ceiling here is going to
become part of the light source. I'll take a sample shot like that.
See how much softer that shadow is under her chin and just generally the lighting on
the face is so much better and the catch light in her eyes looks really nice too.
Because now the light source is much higher moving that catch light up a
little bit.
There's another modification to that that I'd really like to make and that's to
flip this diffuser out. Just about all mid-range and higher-end flashes will
have this.
There's also a little white reflector card there that I can use and what this
reflector card is going to do is it's going to bounce some of the light
straightforward, just filling in some of the shadow. So instead of just the
ceiling being the light source
it's going to add a little bit of front lighting too. So we'll have a combination
of top and front lighting.
So I'll take a couple more shots
So you can see if you look closely, that that changed both the light on her face
and the catch light in her eyes.
So i'll put that card back and then I want to experiment with turning this to
the side a little bit because one of the great things about a bounce flashe is, you
don't have to bounce it straight up. You can actually bounce it off of the left
or right walls and you really need to size up the room that you're in, because
it's going to be reflecting off the walls and the ceiling therefore there's no
one rule. But i will often like to bounce it off the side just to get a little bit
of side lighting in there so the lighting isn't just so square and from
the front.
So let's see what happens when I bounce it off the left a little bit
So you can see that
changing the angle of the head does change the lighting but that's going to vary
depending on the room that you're in. If you had differently colored walls or
ceilings that would change it too. If you had bright green walls our bright red
walls, that color would reflect back on your model and change their skin tones.
So that's something you need to look out for. Often ceilings will be painted something
different or they'll be metal and that will change the way your bounce flash
works. So, you really have to experiment and size up the room that
you're in and there's no rule to it.
You just have to learn through experience. So I'll try bouncing the
flash off the right wall here and we'll see if that's different than the left wall.
And you can see that did change the lighting! Now we have what I call broad
lighting because by bouncing the light off the right wall
it's illuminating the side of her face that's closer to the camera. In other
words, the larger side of her face.
When I bounced it off the left wall, it was bouncing off and hitting the far side of
her face and I call that narrow lighting.
So you can see, you really have a lot of control just by twisting your flash head
around just a little bit.
This room isn't a good choice for it, but sometimes I'll even bounce it off the
wall behind me to make a huge light source. I have just open area behind me
so that sort of reflection wouldn't really work.
Now, if you're in a room with high ceilings you might find that the flash
doesn't make it all the way down to your subject.
You can try adding more power, but in larger rooms bounce flash simply won't
work.
It also won't work outside. If you want to light somebody with flash and have
it not look terrible?
When you're outside or in a room with high ceilings or colored ceiling or
colored walls,
I suggest putting a softbox or other light modifier on your flash.
I hope you found this video useful. If you want more free videos like this go
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teaches you concepts just like this. Mastering lighting, composition, flash
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And questions, comments? Add them down below.
Thanks.