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Bouncing a Flash off the Ceiling – Lighting Test

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Once you get a flash, speedlight or speedlite unit the first thing you are told is to get it off your camera. Sometimes a situation just doesn’t accommodate this – like shooting an event light a trade show, wedding or social event where it’s more important to catch the shot then get perfect lighting.

So when you can’t get your flash unit off your camera you have to do the next best thing: bounce. If you’re lucky the ceilings are low enough to accommodate bouncing, I find 8 – 12′ ceilings are best for this. Now that you know you are going to bounce your light off the ceiling do you know at what angle? The flash I demoed, the Nikon SB600, there’s 5 settings: 0° (straight at the subject, ie. not bounce), 45°, 60°, 70° and 90° (straight up). I grabbed my mannequin head (we’ll call her Sharla for obvious reasons) and did some test shots.

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Using Red Gel to Boost Greens in the Background

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I did a quick proof of concept test with my gels and SB600 today – it was pretty cool.

The thought behind this is: If we use a orange gel over a flash or strobe to add orange to a light on the subject to balance out the orange sun light on the background what we are also doing is using orange on our subject to add blue (orange’s compliment) to the background.

If that is the case – flip your thinking around and don’t use a gel to match your subject’s white balance to the background – bring out a color in the background by casting it’s compliment onto your subject! I wanted to bring out the spring green in the trees by using a red (green’s compliment) color cast on my subject. Read on to see how it went. Here’s a hint – it worked 😉

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Lighting the Egg Photograph

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I remember one day in college I was sitting next to a kid in a free computer lab working on some stuff before class and he opened up a photograph of an egg that he shot for his “Advanced Commercial Photography” class. He told me that “this is the ultimate test for a photographer, perfectly lighting a white egg against a white background.” This was about a year before I bought my D70s and I thought it was a cool idea and a cool photograph.

Come to find out the kid was:

  1. a tool
  2. arrogant spoiled rich kid
  3. wrong

Lighting an egg is not the ultimate test, but a good exercise in lighting. When photographing an egg you want to eliminate as much shadow as possible but give the egg definition so it doesn’t get washed out in the white.

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