One of the ever-present questions on every on-the-go photographer's mind is how to achieve soft lighting with an on-camera flash. This question has led to countless answers, such as an almost endless variety of diffusers (eg.
Sto-fen Omni Bounce,
Gary Fong Lightsphere,
Magic Diffuser) and other portable versions of studio-inspired solutions (eg.
Falcon Eyes Strobist kit) but it always remains a compromise between effectiveness and convenience. The basic premise is, the larger and the more distributed the surface area of the light source is, the more even, balanced and "soft" your subject will be lit.
In a studio, this is achieved with large softboxes, umbrellas and reflectors, which are all very effective but not feasible for shooting while roaming around such as at a concert or wedding. The smaller solutions listed above all manage to soften the light to a certain degree, but again, the amount of softening is more or less related to how bulky the contraption is. The Gary Fong Lightsphere appears to be quite good, however when wrangling through a crowd at a packed concert, you run a big risk of it accidentally getting knocked off and stepped on. The Sto-fen Omni bounce is by far the most compact of any diffuser on the market, in fact it adds virtually no girth to your flash head and just a centimeter or 2 in length. But, it is only marginally successful at softening the flash light.
Flash head rotated 180 degrees from standard position
One thing you hear early on when learning about using your on camera flash it to make use of your surroundings as a reflector, if possible. A typical example of this is white walls or ceilings. To make use of this, a flash head can be pointed upwards, either straight up or
at an angle when shooting indoors to utilize the ceiling as a giant reflector. All high-end flashes such as Nikon's SB-900 and even some low-cost basic flashes like the
Yongnuo 460 have a built-in bounce card that can be slid out from above the flash head. This allows some of the light to be directed forward towards the subject even when the head is pointed at the ceiling. This usually leads to nice results, however the subject's exposure still tends to change a lot when changing the distance between you and the subject. TTL metering is designed to calculate this distance and ambient light in order to determine how much flash power is needed, however this is only really useful when lighting directly (i.e. flash head pointed straight at the subject), which is not what we want. This is also why TTL isn't very useful when getting into more advanced lighting techniques.
One trick I've recently discovered in order to make full use of indirect bounced lighting off the ceiling and
only indirect lighting is to literally turn the flash's built-in bounce card against himself. Instead of shooting with the bounce card between you and the flash head, turn your flash head 180 degrees so that the bounce card is between the flash and the subject.
The result is extremely soft, silky smooth and even lighting - again, provided that there is a white ceiling above our head. It helps to soften the light even more if you employ an Omni bounce (Sto-fen or any other brand) on top of the flash head, while the bounce card is still extended.
Subject 3 meters away
Same flash power, subject 50 cm away.
Notice the light is stronger but not as much as one might expect.
More examples:
Flash power 1/16
Flash power 1/16
Flash power 1/16
Flash power 1/4
So there you have one other method to get studio-quality lighting indoors. It's hard to believe that these shots were taken with just one on-camera speedlite, eh? :)
