I Need Light

The Great Badger

The Great Badger

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Adam
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Got some young kittens running around the house at the moment, and aside form the challenge of shooting something with the attention span of a hyperactive goldfish my house is like a hobbit's cave.

I'm running a D5100 with 18-105 kit ATM (more to come, situation forced sale of last rig and kit) and I'm really not a fan of on board flashes so tend to keep it turned off. Result = Blur or noise through ISO, appreciate this is probably not the best course of action with fast moving critters in dimly lit areas so any advice on how to soften the harshness of the flash and general tips would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Adam
 
Assuming you mean you want to soften the onboard flash... Tape a little bit of card wrapped in tinfoil in front of the onboard flash at about 45deg so the light is bounced up and doesn't leak forward. Pretty basic but it should do to give you some softer bounced light if you are indoors. Alternatively you could use some semi-opaque plastic like the stuff milk cartons are made from for a similar effect but it should allow a little light to pass directly forwards.
 
velonoir said:
Assuming you mean you want to soften the onboard flash... Tape a little bit of card wrapped in tinfoil in front of the onboard flash at about 45deg so the light is bounced up and doesn't leak forward. Pretty basic but it should do to give you some softer bounced light if you are indoors. Alternatively you could use some semi-opaque plastic like the stuff milk cartons are made from for a similar effect but it should allow a little light to pass directly forwards.
Click to expand...

Yes, and both techniques work well, especially the second one with a bit of shoot-through to fill in shadows cast by the ceiling bounce - if you can get the balance right between ceiling/bounce and fill-in.

The problem doing this with the on-board flash is bouncing needs a lot of power, so you'll need to ramp up the ISO a lot. The other thing is the bounce/fill-in ratio, and with kitten presumably you're going to be around floor level, dramatically increasing the flash to ceiling distance, compared to standing up. Not sure how successful that would be. Long flash recycle times too.

Maybe try another route, that I've used successfully with dogs. Use daylight, outdoors or near a window or patio door. Maybe get someone to hold a reflector to fill-in the shadow side (large piece of white card etc). Then just use the on-board flash for a tiny dash of fill-in, just to add a bit of sparkle, but not too much. Pop-up flash is ideal for that. Problem though is blurring from ambient light if kittens are jumping around.

Really needs a decent flash gun or two...
 
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