Indoor Portraits - SHADOWS!! How to get rid?

MindofMel

MindofMel

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Hi all,

Had an 'emergency' job to fill in for someone and only had one flash on me, with no triggers - so was on Hotshoe and had to take some cheesy business portraits..

Full story of situation is here: http://www.mindofmel.co.uk/bts-headshot-portraits/

Clients were overjoyed with getting what they got last minute. But for my own learning, any advice on how to get rid of shadows with only one Hotshoe Flash?
 
More distance between subject and background?
 
admirable said:
More distance between subject and background?
Click to expand...

Available space from wall to an immovable business 900metre long table was about 3 metres MAX. In which I needed to be aswell. As once i mentioned the green leaf background they were adamant to use it.. my big mouth lol. If I had moved them forward, I would have been at the 17-20mm end of lens and it would have started stretching faces etc.
 
There was a white ceiling which you could have used as a giant reflector. Aim your flash at it and turn it into the source of light for your subjects. Get it right and you could avoid getting shadows behind them as well as the harsh shadows on their faces.

I can't see any mention of which flashgun you used, but you might have also had Nikon's CLS to enable you to take the flash off-camera.
 
Bounce of ceiling or even walls if possible....though watch out for coloured surfaces causing colour casts.

or

Diffuse the light - my personal preference, having tried most options, is a bounce card which fastens to flash with velcro and have adjustable angles which can alter the softness of shadow. I use one of THESE, the larger one, or there are DembFlip ones which are bigger and sturdier but considerably more expensive too.
Other alternatives, and all available from ebay cheaply enough, include lightspheres and mini softboxes and of course the stofen type diffusers, which are least effective but also easiest to carry and still much better than naked flash.
 
I am actually tying to remember whether I tried to bounce the flash off the ceiling. I am 95% sure I did and couldn't get it right / shadows under eye sockets etc. As I spent a good 15 mins getting prepped in the room. That however, would make sense! I think the small working space made that hard. Thanks, Will

Hi Yvonne, hope your well! Looks like an interesting bit of kit, will get one when that student loan drops in May :)
 
Any art shop will sell you some foam board which you can cut to fit, and attach with a rubber band - it is firm enough to hold its shape, cheap enough to be replaced when it gets damaged, and yet looks professional enough to not make you look like a cheap-skate. You can diffuse flash, bounce it off walls or ceilings or whatever you want.
No need to wait till the grant comes along - 60p for a 10x8 sheet roughly !
 
i've been reading Neil van Niekerk's book lately and I would recommend the technique he would apply in this situation, which would be to underexpose the ambient by 1 stop and then bounce flash from a wall or ceiling to provide fill light and some wrap. You can choose to take the window light into consideration as ambient, had it not been blocked out, which would help in lowering iso or flash power required.
 
To avoid the shadowy eye sockets from bounce flash, you could use your D300's built-in flash to provide fill as well as wireless triggering your flashgun (assuming it's Nikon CLS compatible - you've still not said what it is).
 
Shadows? Everyone's got them you know... the modern obsession with shadowless softlight is very unhealthy.... sorry, personal bug-bear...


Anyway, regardless of the very short distance between subject and backing, the light source (flash) is too low. Take it up in height, shadow goes down, looks more natural. And as a bonus, you get some of the third dimension - the lack of backlight combined with the flat horizontal light makes the subjects look completely cardboard cut-out - angled shadows help give depth to face and body.
 
I don't know why, but I misread and thought the thread was just about eliminating the background shadows. :bonk:

In that case, I might consider bouncing the flash off something other than the ceiling to even out the light and soften the shadows on the faces.
 
Hi all,

Sorry I have been talking about background shadows. Im quite satisfied with how they are all lit - just not a fan of the shadows on the background

My flash was not CLS compatible. It is a Jessops 360 AFN - when on the HS - you cannot use the built in flash.

If I knew I was going to be shooting portraits I would have taken my friends SB800 and the 360AFN plus triggers and some brollies.

My question was more for work arounds when using a hotshoe mounted flash. The bits of kit to diffuse and direct light seem up the right street. I did have a stofen on the flash which softened things up on the faces but didn't do much to eliminate BG shadowing.

Sorry for any confusion all. Maybe bg shadows is the tradeoff for using a hotshoe mounted flash. I just wanted to see if there were any gem secrets I was unaware of being a noob n all.
 
If you have your subject close to background, there WILL be shadows on bg. No work around that. You need distance, as suggested by admirable. It's even worse if the flash is on camera. If it was off camera, you could have placed the light strategically, so the casting shadow would be out of the frame, but in this case, you could do very little else, I'd say.
 
You need to get your subject away from the background if possible and use very large diffuse light source. Easy way with on camera flash is to bounce it off the walls, into the room behind you etc. Ceiling bounce creates racoon eyes so I avoid using it if at all possible.


If you really must use direct flash I would use a bounce card, the bigger the better, just make one out of white cardboard or foam.

Someone mentioned Neil van Neierk's book, find out about it and see his tangent blog here
http://neilvn.com/tangents/


This is a very good site for bounce flash techniques, I often use the black foamie thing technique, or even my hand to flag the flash from the subject and bounce it on a wall or some other surface. With todays high ISO cameras you can do some amazing stuff with bounce flash.
 
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