Will an umbrella make your light softer?

January 14th, 2008 by ted

S0 you just bought yourself a flash for your *insert Canon/Nikon/Pentax/Olympus/Sony here* DSLR. You put it on your camera hotshoe, you switched it on and you take a photo and you expected the picture to come out ‘perfect’.

Well, surprised surprised, you either get a washout image where there’s no detail present *ahem, I pun kena jugak dulu masa mula mula belajar* or the image looks dark or you get the devilish look with the ‘red eye’ effect. Not nice, no?

So what do you do? If you turn down the power of your flash it won’t affect the ‘quality’ of your light. It will only affect your exposure. If you change the shutter speed of your camera it will only affect ambient light, not flash.

By now you should know that on camera flash/portable strobe on your camera will give out harsh horrible light. If you missus /gf has oily skin they will certainly ’shine’. Funny to some, but it’s a serious matter to your missus/gf. So what ever you do, don’t use direct flash unless it is absolutely necessary (More on that later) .

So, what’s the ‘best’ way to use your flash?

Erm, there’s no ‘best’ or ‘bad’ way to use a flash, it all depends on your ‘vision’. Most common advise given is that you will need to bounced it to any surface so the reflected light will be soft and harsh shadows eliminated. Preferably if the said surface is white so you won’t get any funky colours erm, coloured your subject matter, that is, your missus/gf. If you’re indoor, the ceiling is the most convenient surface to bounced the light. Or the nearest wall. take your pick lah.

When you bounced the light (to any surface that you choose, that is…) 2 things happens:

a) the light becomes softer - even tho your flash emits the erm, light, the surface that you bounced it from is the actual lightsource. Since the ceiling is relatively bigger than you flash head (the clear plastic part where the flash being emitted from), the resulting light becomes softer due to the apprent size of the ceiling and the subject matter.

b) you need to increase the light output - sometimes TTL reading gets fooled. If you bounced the flash to a high ceiling the resulting image will still be dark. That’s due to the extra distance the light need to travel from the flash to the ceiling and back down to the subject. You may need to compensate the flash output by INCREASING the amount of light via the flash compensation function either on the flash itself, or the DSLR flash menu. Generally, a +1EV compnsation on the flash is almost always enough for my erm, general photography. I prefer to use compensation feature on the flash itself, but’s that my personal preferences lah.

Or use a wider apeture on your camera lens.

Take care the angle of your flash will affect the shadows area that will appear under the nose, chin and eye socket etc.

That’s where the fill-in bounce card on some flash are for.

What if you don’t have any surface to bounce your light?

There are a few light modifer in the market such as that Stofen diffuser thingies or the Mr. Gary Foong LightSphere™ (from this point on I shall refers it as ‘LS’).

But the Stofen and the LS has it limitations. The idea is that when you put on the light modifiers, you spread out the lights thus made them softer (the light modifiers has becomes a bigger lightsource and all…). But remember, as you move AWAY from your subject, the apparent size of the Stofen and LS has becomes smaller, thus creating a noticebaly darker shadows against using it near your subject. Do a test lah, you see what I mean. Even tho I have the Stofen and the LS, I still invest in an umbrella.

Note the relative difference between the ‘naked’ flash on the left against the umbrella in the right.

If you’re not quite understand what I’ve typed here so far (do pay attention now as I gonna type this once) let me give you an analogy.

On a bright sunny clear blue sky day there’s loadsa lights around, no? You take a picture of your missus/gf (I do realised there’s a few female reader here as well, the writing may seems targetted at male readers since it’s the guys who are the gearheads not the ladies *grins*, My apologies in advance to all) and lo and behold! There’s some ugly shadows across the face and what’s the blown highlights doing there at the same time, not nice no? On a cloudy day, whichever direction you point your camera, the light is pleasantly softer and even and the contrast is lower. Ahhhhhhhhhh….. (cue some pleasant music playing in the background).

A reader - ‘But Ted, that’s all fine lah, but what exactly do you mean?’

Well, when the sun is out, even tho it is a huge ball of burning gas spanning millions of miles in diameter, due to its distance, its just a small light source up there in the sky. Think of a bare light bulb but many many times in intensity. It is directional, hence the hard shadows.

When the sky is covered by the clouds (or in our case, the Haze, I remembered back in 1991 it was particularly bad but thats another story lah…) the sun light is being diffused. Instead of a single point of light, the diffused lights comes from every direction hence the soft shadows/no shadows. The cloud has becomes a big light source.

Small light source, hard shadows. Big light source, soft shadows.

So, will an umbrella make your light softer? Read on…

Dumbdumb, a PhotoMalaysia.com member help setting up the lights…

The above image was made during my first session with Epa.

One Nikon SB-26 Speedlight was diffused thru a translucent umbrella attached with a Manfrotto tilt & swivel umbrella adaptor on a lightstand.

I prefer a big huge softbox myself but that set up is bulky. If I were to bring my Bowens strobe and its battery pack (which I don’t have any to start with!) I need another assistant (Starving Artist cannot afford multiple assistants…)!

Either way, time is of the essence as the ‘Golden hour’ in tropical Malaysia only lasted minutes!

Flash/Portable strobe set up is the way to go.

Epa in ‘Red Planet’ series..

So, will an umbrella makes your light softer?

In a nutshell, yes.

Articles courtesy of Ted Adnan from http://tedadnan.com/blog/?p=63

P/s: I just bought an equipment shown above...hehe..rm..rm..rm..rm