My big Christmas present this year was an external flash unit for my camera. Which means that, among the 354 (!!) pictures I took while at my parents’ were a bunch playing with different flash settings. Why? These two pictures should give you the idea:
The first is taken with the flash angled straight ahead, and the second with the flash angled upward so it bounced off the ceiling first. I definitely think the second looks better– there isn’t the same glare off SteelyKid’s forehead, and the background is illuminated more uniformly.
Both of these show SteelyKid watching “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (or, as she put it, “watch Bumble!”) in my parents’ basement. She sat through that probably ten times, and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” another eight or so. We don’t have either on the DVR here, which has not yet led to a crisis. We do have the Grinch book, which she demanded four or five times tonight.
Neither of these have been color-corrected at all, to allow direct comparison. Fiddling with the colors can improve the direct-flash photo a bit, but it’s complicated. The indirect-flash picture looks perfectly fine as is.
Anyway, that’s me playing with my Christmas toys. We’ve got a bunch of photos of SteelyKid with her Christmas presents as well, some of which may end up here. Here’s hoping that you all got something you enjoy fiddling with as much.
Yep – The light on the face is better in the indirect photo, and of course the face is the most important element.
Yep again – The bounce flash makes the room’s illumination more natural, and the photo overall doesn’t scream “I used a flash!” like the first one does.
Nonetheless, the indirect photo has easily fixable problems with both low contrast and color balance. If your image editing program has “eyedropper” tools in Curves or Levels, you can do the fix super-fast without having to gripe that “…it’s complicated.”
Just use the “Set White Point” eyedropper on the white wall above Steelykid’s head and the “Set Black Point” eyedropper on the black object near the blue dog ears. Done.
I’ll send an e-mail to your Contact address with a jpg attached showing you how much improvement you can get even in the preferred indirect shot. Look for something from Kimbrough82002 with the subject “Eyedropper.”
I sometimes take 3,000 photos in a week for a couple of magazines that buy my images. Editors can ask for 200 cleaned-up shots for initial review RIGHT NOW, so I’ve had to learn the most rapid paths for photo-tweaking.
The second has nicer illumination.
While the whole composition is off if you ask me;
attention getting drawn to the pillow and blue kangaroo..
Also observe the way the pillow seems to absorb the face.
I do like the kangaroo though!
But I guess it’s just practice, keep it up!
I know how to use the color-correction tools in GIMP, but the simple and easy fix doesn’t work very well on the direct-flash picture– if the white items in the background look white, SteelyKid looks like an alien, and if the white bits of her outfit look white, she looks like she’s on another planet. So something more complicated has to be done for that one. But at that point, it’s not an entirely fair comparison any more, because it turns into “which one did I do a better job manipulating to look good?” Also, it would take a lot longer than I wanted to spend on this post.
The quick-and-easy color correction does a great job fixing up the indirect-flash photo, and if I wanted to use it for anything else, I’d definitely do that. These are really just “look-at-my-new-toy” test photos, though, so I went with uncorrected for both.
The difference is even more dramatic on outdoor, bright light pictures where flash helps bringing out the aspects of the picture you want emphasized (say faces), which otherwise tend to come out dark or full of strange shadow/light patterns. Even more options with a flash diffuser, which is easy enough (even for a theorist) to make yourself.
Probably just my eyes, but objects in the background on the first shot also look blurrier. Is your camera on some automatic focus setting that takes into account ambient light levels?
It’s set to a fairly wide aperture at the moment, so objects in the back should be a little blurry. I think the lower light level in the background of the direct-flash picture exaggerates the amount of blur there, but I’m not sure how to quantify that. They’re both auto-focused on SteelyKid, for whatever that’s worth.
So here’s a couple of dangerous references for a physicist:
1. The Strobist website
2. Light: Science and Magic.
The former has a wonderful “Lighting 101” series of articles on lighting techniques and equipment, while the latter explains in detail how to light tricky subjects. For example, you can color match the flash to the surroundings by covering the flash with an appropriate colored piece of plastic (a “gel”).
First time I’m seeing the `steelykid. All and any lighting looks good to me on such a cute subject.