Bounce flash in a church

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joescrivens

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My friend is having her baby christened in a month and I want to take some photos during the event. I wondered how bounce flash can work in a church having never done it before, is it possible? Aren't the ceilings crazy high?

just wondered what peoples experience is with this
 
I would be very suprised if flash will be allowed during the christening. I see you have a couple of fast primes, I would use one of those for during the ceremony. You're right about the high ceilings. I would suggest diffusing the flash.
 
Thanks Dave

Yeah I guess I meant not during the actual christening part, but after it was finished and taking some photos in the church.

To diffuse the flash I would need a softbox right?
 
Unless you are planning on getting all "studio" on them, the diffuser you want is a stofen type. My other tip would be to use a TTL cord to get the flash off camera - get someone to hold it for you about 45 degrees to your subject.

Quick, dirty, no mucking around and it will look loads better than blasted straight in the face.

Thats my tip, but hey, I shoot cars and motorbikes, not babies.
 
If you use something like this for fill flash, should be all you need, especially if the Lady's are wearing hat's.

3851236395_be6a43673e_o.jpg
 
desantnik said:
Unless you are planning on getting all "studio" on them, the diffuser you want is a stofen type. My other tip would be to use a TTL cord to get the flash off camera - get someone to hold it for you about 45 degrees to your subject.

Quick, dirty, no mucking around and it will look loads better than blasted straight in the face.

Thats my tip, but hey, I shoot cars and motorbikes, not babies.
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stofen diffuser, i'll have to look into that. I have a 7d with a 430 ex so I can go wireless without needing a cord
 
The card is to push some light forward whilst bouncing the main power off of the ceiling. Works for hats as described and also good for catchlights in the eyes. No good if the ceiling is 200ft above you.

BTW, the other thing I should have said is to practice before hand. You can do all the things I suggested in your home to perfect your technique of distance, framing etc. Remember your ambient light might be less, so try to experiment with how focus performs in low light - if you have a focus assist light on the camera or flash, use it!

Oh and just noticed you say about using the 7D's wireless flash controller - again, experiment. How it performs in your lounge, will be different to how it performs in a big space with no bounce for it to see. I find Nikon's CLS system very frustrating. TTL chord is good old Victorian engineering and takes the hit and miss out - even though I have wireless radio triggers! Its all too much for a family photo at an event!
 
desantnik said:
The card is to push some light forward whilst bouncing the main power off of the ceiling. Works for hats as described and also good for catchlights in the eyes. No good if the ceiling is 200ft above you.
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Think out of the box, bounce off someone in a white shirt, the wall, place your hand over the card at a slight angle forward, the possibility's are endless :D
 
Well, just have a muck around at home and see what you can do. A few hours play will teach you loads!
 
if you can't get a stofen in time, i've seen people using the cut off bottom of a white hand soap dispenser :)
 
joescrivens said:
what is that exactly? can you explain?
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The back of a business card and an elastic band, it's all you need Bro and they are free ;)

There are plenty of gadgets out there that people swear by, but this is basically the all that is needed.
 
Chaz Photos said:
I just done one last week and shot at ISO 1000 f2.8 all look good
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Depends if your penchant is for natural light or a more punchy flash type look... and of course what light you find there on the day. Dark gloomy February day with dark clouds and dark medieval church, it could be like the black hole of calcutta in there.
 
PerfectSpeed said:
Think out of the box, bounce off someone in a white shirt, the wall, place your hand over the card at a slight angle forward, the possibility's are endless :D
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Ask the vicar (in white cassock) to turn his/her back to you and bounce off him/her.

Otherwise, small bounce card with highish ISO, wide aperture and slowish shutter. I think it's -3 stops flash exposure compensation for Canon.
 
desantnik said:
Depends if your penchant is for natural light or a more punchy flash type look... and of course what light you find there on the day. Dark gloomy February day with dark clouds and dark medieval church, it could be like the black hole of calcutta in there.
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Yes well true Mine was at 3pm so I visited the church a few days before to get a feel of the place best to go about same time so you see if there is sun where it will be.
 
@ 3:48 says it all

[youtube]GV_A7YeOhfs[/youtube]
 
So with the stofen type diffuser do you still point the flash up or do you then point the flash at the subject?
 
joescrivens said:
My friend is having her baby christened in a month and I want to take some photos during the event. I wondered how bounce flash can work in a church having never done it before, is it possible? Aren't the ceilings crazy high?

just wondered what peoples experience is with this
Click to expand...
I've shot a couple of church weddings and found that I was fine at around 800 ISO, f/2.8 and 1/100 or thereabouts, without flash. At other services in different venues I've needed 3200 ISO, f/2.8 and 1/60 to get a correct exposure, again without using flash. Whether you would need flash really depends on how the church is lit, what the weather is like and what the insides of the church look like (colour, shape, distance). It also depends on what size prints you want to make and how much noise you are prepared to deal with. I've shot indoor basketball with a 7D at 6400 ISO, no flash. The results weren't awful.

It would probably keep things simpler to avoid flash, so long as the ambient light is of acceptable quantity, quality and direction, but that's the $64,000 question. Without knowing what the church is like, and the lighting on the day, it is hard to give specific advice. If you don't have glass of f/2.8 or faster you might struggle a little, but it really depends. If the church has unclutterd white ceiling then flash may work well. If it is busy with beams and oak panelling then you (probably) may as well not bother.

What I would suggest is that you shoot with manual exposure, so the camera is not fooled by light streaming through windows in the background, or candles and other internal lighting, and also not fooled by dark suits vs pale frocks. Hopefully, the lighting where you shoot will be fairly even and constant, so once you have a good exposure set (check the histogram) then you should be OK for a while. Don't be afraid to use higher ISOs if you need to. The important thing is not to underexpose your images. It's better to expose correctly at 1600 ISO than to underexpose at 800.

Shoot raw an you will give yourself the maximum flexibility to tweak, if you need to, afterwards. Even if you nail exposure, white balance might be an amusing challenge. Raw will help you out. On the subject of white balance, if you do use flash, you might want to consider matching your flash temperature to the predominant ambient light. If that is daylight you will be OK. If it is tungsten you may need to warm up your flash to more closely match the tungsten colour temperature.
 
joescrivens said:
So with the stofen type diffuser do you still point the flash up or do you then point the flash at the subject?
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Using a Stofen or bounce-card in somewhere like a church with a very high ceiling is completely useless.

They both work by sending most of the light upwards and, with the Stofen, all around. Fong and Lambency work in basically the same way. This bounces off the ceiling and walls to provide fill-in and softening. In normal rooms it works really well but without anything to bounce off, it has no effect at all - other than to waste most of the light into nowhere.

To soften the light, you must make it bigger. If you haven't got a handy ceiling/wall or softbox/brolly, a Lumiquest is the best way of doing that and they work well at close range - would be fine for a close-ish shot of baby, baby/parents etc. For larger groups the effect if less beneficial as the flash becomes much smaller relative to the subject when used at distance. Still well worth using but the benefit is not so great.

Last time I did a Christening a Lumiquest worked pretty well and I was lucky to have a reasonable amount of ambient light so I slowed the shutter for some fill-in. This lightens the shadows a lot and also brings the background to life. Lumiquest http://www.lumiquest.com/
 
tdodd said:
I've shot a couple of church weddings and found that I was fine at around 800 ISO, f/2.8 and 1/100 or thereabouts, without flash. At other services in different venues I've needed 3200 ISO, f/2.8 and 1/60 to get a correct exposure, again without using flash. Whether you would need flash really depends on how the church is lit, what the weather is like and what the insides of the church look like (colour, shape, distance). It also depends on what size prints you want to make and how much noise you are prepared to deal with. I've shot indoor basketball with a 7D at 6400 ISO, no flash. The results weren't awful.

It would probably keep things simpler to avoid flash, so long as the ambient light is of acceptable quantity, quality and direction, but that's the $64,000 question. Without knowing what the church is like, and the lighting on the day, it is hard to give specific advice. If you don't have glass of f/2.8 or faster you might struggle a little, but it really depends.

What I would suggest is that you shoot with manual exposure, so the camera is not fooled by light streaming through windows in the background, or candles and other internal lighting, and also not fooled by dark suits vs pale frocks. Hopefully, the lighting where you shoot will be fairly even and constant, so once you have a good exposure set (check the histogram) then you should be OK for a while.
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Yeah I do have 3 primes and 1 zoom that are all 2.8 or under so don't have any problems with this. It's more if I am doing a group shot when 2.8 is going to be just too shallow and I want to go up to 5.6 or thereabouts.

I always shoot manual so that shouldn't be a problem
 
HoppyUK said:
Using a Stofen or bounce-card in somewhere like a church with a very high ceiling is completely useless.

They both work by sending most of the light upwards and, with the Stofen, all around. Fong and Lambency work in basically the same way. This bounces off the ceiling and walls to provide fill-in and softening. In normal rooms it works really well but without anything to bounce off, it has no effect at all - other than to waste most of the light into nowhere.

To soften the light, you must make it bigger. If you haven't got a handy ceiling/wall or softbox/brolly, a Lumiquest is the best way of doing that and they work well at close range - would be fine for a close-ish shot of baby, baby/parents etc. For larger groups the effect if less beneficial as the flash becomes much smaller relative to the subject when used at distance. Still well worth using but the benefit is not so great.

Last time I did a Christening a Lumiquest worked pretty well and I was lucky to have a reasonable amount of ambient light so I slowed the shutter for some fill-in. This lightens the shadows a lot and also brings the background to life. Lumiquest http://www.lumiquest.com/
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Which lumiquest did you use though? There are loads on that site was it the bounce kit or the pocket bouncer? or another?
 
joescrivens said:
Which lumiquest did you use though? There are loads on that site was it the bounce kit or the pocket bouncer? or another?
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On that particular Christening, it was the Lumiquest Ultrasoft, but I've now swapped that for the (new) Quik Bounce. They are basically similar but the Quik Bounce does a lot more things making it very versatile indeed.

It has two flaps in the top so you can open those up and get a Stofen/bounce-card effect but still with the benefit of a larger (softer) fill-in light. Also, because it fits on the short side of the flash head, you can rotate and angle it for vertical shooting, bounce off a wall and retain the fill-in effect - loads of different ways. Last but maybe not least, because light doesn't get blasted out of the back and wasted 95% of the time, it is quite efficient (you can still fire it backwards if you like).

I think the Quik Bounce is the single most useful accessory you can buy for a flash gun http://www.lumiquest.com/products/quik-bounce.htm £38 I think from places like Warehouse Express. You only look slightly daft using it, which is better than being a complete idiot with a Fong.

This is a good tutorial which explain how on-flash modifiers work
http://www.lumiquest.com/how-light-modifiers-work.htm
 
HoppyUK said:
On that particular Christening, it was the Lumiquest Ultrasoft, but I've now swapped that for the (new) Quik Bounce. They are basically similar but the Quik Bounce does a lot more things making it very versatile indeed.

QUOTE]

I never really got on with the Ultrasoft as it still seemed to give harsh shadows - was I doing something wrong?
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keirik said:
I never really got on with the Ultrasoft as it still seemed to give harsh shadows - was I doing something wrong?
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Probably using it at distance - over 6-8ft or so it works much less well. Softness of the light is wholly dependent on the size, and size reduces quickly relative to the subject with distance.

Not being flippant but the sun is quite big, but it's pretty close to a point light source to us, hence the harsh shadows of direct sun. Taking this analogy a step further, when sun light is diffused by clouds the light source effectively becomes the whole sky and the light is practically shadowless.

This link I posted earlier as a good demo of how flash gun modifiers work http://www.lumiquest.com/how-light-modifiers-work.htm
 
1/40 shutter did you have IS? I think if I went 1/40 at 153mm I'd suffer from camera shake
 
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