How To Get Better Flash Photos Using Only a Business Card

You've probably seen professional photographers taking photos with their flashes pointed up toward the ceiling. The reason for this is that the white ceiling diffuses the light from the flash and changes its direction of propagation. The resulting pictures look natural as people are often lit from above and taking photos this way gives the photos more depth and colour. It also helps to not wash out the foreground and leave a dark background as can sometimes happen with small camera flash photography.

How You Can Get Better Flash Photos

That's all well and good for the pros, but what if your camera doesn't have a shoe mount for a flash or you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new flash? I've developed a technique which will allow you to take better flash photos indoors for free using only a business card. All you do is hold the business card, or any other white card, in front of the flash of your camera at an angle, as shown below. This will redirect most of the light towards the ceiling and result in a soft light illuminating your subject from above.
The angle at which you hold the card is important, if you hold it too close to horizontal, the top of the flash might be seen in the frame. If you hold it too high, the light might be blocked too much and your photo will come out dark.

Examples and Demonstration

Above are two photos taken of the 35 mm film SLR which I used as an example at the top of this article. The photo on the left was taken normally with the light striking the subject from straight on. The photo on the right shows how much of an improvement the business card technique can make to flash photography. (Note that the flash attached to the SLR was not used during the photographs)

You can see from the images below that when using the camera normally, on the left, the light which strikes the subject is directional and hard, casting stark shadows. In the right-hand example, the business card reflects the light upwards which bounces off the white ceiling and casts an even, soft light over the subject which looks more natural.

The intensity of the light is reduced quite a lot when using this method, so a digital camera with a strong flash will give better results in most situations.

Posted by Andrew at 12:30 am, Tuesday 12th August, 2008
Permalink: http://productions.andrewgentle.com/tutorials/how_to_get_better_flash_photos_using_only_a_business_card/

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