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Special Event Photography Scenario: So I've been playing around with and just read some tips on BOUNCE FLASH

It warns that if you bounce the flash off of a colored wall, you're likely to get some color cast. My question is what would a pro do if you're at a wedding and want to use bounce flash but lets say the walls are bright red (unlikely but what if).

I'm semipro like you. Bouncing a flash is a great way to set your pix apart---make them look more professional. Oftentimes we'll use a bounce card just to avoid redeye, that is get the light source far enough away from the lens-to-eye axis that the back of the subject's eyeball isn't illuminated by the flash.

The old freebie way of doing that is to point your flash up and sort of bend a paper plate around the top. You can purchase, pretty cheaply, something that does the same thing and attaches with velcro, but which looks a little more professional than a paper plate. I have several such units from Lumiquest. Click on the links below to see what I'm talking about.

Bouncing off the ceiling is another matter. It gives a REALLY COOL effect to many pics because unlike head-on flash where the foreground subjects are properly exposed but everybody else is in a murky background, when bounced off the ceiling the foreground AND some background subjects have ample light. The problem that sometimes arises with that technique is that people's bangs can sometimes cast a shadow over their own eyes (if you don't get the angle just right).
Also, there's the problem you noted in your question, that colored walls and ceiling can add a cast to your pix. This is definitely true. If I knew I wanted to bounce off a slightly warm ceiling, like a beige, say, and I figured a slight blue filter could fix it, what I would do is to take a little gel and put it over the part of the flash where the light comes out (dorky description) and shoot away. This would only be really useful for me, though, if I were shooting the same thing over and over, like at a speech or something, where I was bouncing repeatedly off the ceiling. If I were switching from bounce to direct to paper-plate-mode a whole bunch, I'd probably forego the use of filters, knowing I'd forget to take the filter off and would end up shooting blue people later at the event.

So what else could you use? There's a Lumiquest bounce card (like the paper plate one) that has little holes cut out of it, so that 80 percent goes off the ceiling and 20 percent shoots forward, illuminating the faces of the subjects (or whatever you're shooting) with white light, and bathing the background, hair, etc with whatever color is coming off the ceiling, also putting catchlights (the little glimmer dot) in people's eyes. Check out the second link for this one. It's a great thing to have.

Okay, the rest of the work is yours. Experiment. Have fun. (Amaze your friends!)

Oh, lastly, to get free gels, try and get a sample set of gels from a store that caters to movie people. I'm in LA, so it's pretty easy. If you don't have a store, call or write to Rosco and tell them you want a sample "rack" of their cinegel color correction system. You might also try a company called Lee Filters. They both make little chip-racks (like little paint chips). I've seen a couple sizes, one of which is like 1 1/2 inches by 3 inches, perfect to tape onto the flash part of my flash.

Good luck.

1 Minute with Willy Ep 17. Bounce Flash Photography - Photography Tips

Tags:   bounce flash photography tips · diy · flash · lighting · photography · tutorialNo Comments