How To Take The Flash Off A Melton Camera

Billowy flash off other surfaces

When I am stuck in an area where there aren't any white or near-white surfaces to bounce my flash off, I will look effectually for alternate areas. In the paradigm above, I bounced off the wood paneling and brick walls in this large enclosed entrance surface area of a eating house.

Equally most of you already know, the problem with the bounce flash technique, is that you volition pick up the color cast of the area that you are bouncing your flash off. When this color cast is slightly warm, it is oft simple enough simply to switch to a Daylight White Rest. This slightly common cold color will off-prepare the additional warmth from the off-white surface you lot bounced your wink off.

This image will give you an idea of the colour of the brick and wood that I bounced my flash off.

When an expanse is painted green or blue, especially a darker hue of those colors, then yous will have difficulty getting a good pare tone out of the resultant color bandage because you lot volition invariably have a discontinuous spectrum. In other words, some of the colors that make upwardly a variety of hues, will exist missing. And with blue and green calorie-free, you miss out on the warm colors that brand upwardly skin tones.

This then is less of a trouble when you're bouncing off forest (particularly if the forest isn't dark), or if you bounce flash off brick walls. (Also hopefully non likewise dark.) The color cast that you lot volition become from doing then, is quite warm. Warm enough that you tin often just set your photographic camera'south white balance to Tungsten. Or around 3700K. Or there-abouts. You can dial in an gauge WB setting in Kelvin, and then fine-tune the colors equally part of your usual mail service-processing of the RAW file.

With this kind of extreme color change, information technology is all-time that you shoot in RAW to have the data for such manipulation of your epitome.

Back to the image at the superlative .. I set my camera to Tungsten WB, which did mean the image direct out of the camera was quite close. And so dragging the sliders in ACR, it wasn't that hard to become beautiful peel tones. And in bouncing flash off to my left, flagging my flash with the usual Black Foamie Thing, it was just as simple to get soft directional calorie-free.

My settings where: i/100th @ f1.8 @ 1000 ISO

And so next time that you're stumped for something to bounce your flash off, don't be as well timid to try bouncing off a warm-toned surface like wood or bricks. You might just exist surprised.