2010 - Week 30, Bounced Flash

Family Room
August 1, 2010 8:56 pm
Nikon D90, 18-105 3.5-5.6 VR @ 38mm
Manual, Bounced SB600 Flash, ISO 640, SS 1/40, f/4.5
RAW, Pattern Metering, AF-S, WB in B3

I just love it when the girls lay on the sofa watching TV in this pose. I know they won't fit this way much longer and I wanted to be sure to capture it for their book so they could look back and see more real moments of their lives. Iva has "green", her beloved blanket and we had been at the pool until 8 pm so this is more of how we look on a daily basis.

I decided to wait until nighttime to take a shot so I could try and bounce the flash. I haven't put the SB600 on the camera in months and had never tried bouncing the flash off the wall behind me. I made my sister get the SB600 when she bought her DSLR this spring and I was showing her how to use it when we were back home in June and got much better results bouncing it behind me than off her ceiling - and her walls are deep green.

I started off as close to the bounce flash rule of 4/4/4 guideline - ISO 400, f/4.0, 1/40 as possible, but with the variable aperture lens I wasn't able to get down to f/4.0. I wasn't bouncing off a solid surface either, but instead a bookshelf, so I didn't get as much light reflected back, so bump up my ISO 1/3 stop more than the 1/3 stop aperture difference from the guideline. I didn't check my histogram and was just basing it off the LCD and so I didn't bump it quite far enough (see post-processing note). The first shots were very warm so I adjusted my WB to B3 and got realistic color.

Bouncing the flash behind me allowed me to get larger catch lights than I would have bouncing off the ceiling, and since the light was bounced there are no harsh shadows.

I could have grabbed my 35mm to do this shot, but I like testing things with a kit lens, because its a good example of how the majority of moms with a camera could handle a situation.



post-processing
I had to adjust the exposure in Camera Raw which I could have fixed while shooting if I had been paying any attention to my histogram. Not really an issue with RAW files, but fixing the exposure caused just a hint of noise to come out of the photo - but the good news is that the noise was caused by a default setting in Camera Raw, not really anything to do with the photo itself.

I have been so frustrated by noise and how to fix it in Camera Raw and a post this week by Damien allowed the light bulbs to finally twinkle in my head. Damien lives in Australia, but offers one-on-one Photoshop training via Skype and it was SO wonderful. Sliding the color slider back to 0 cased the bit of graininess I saw to dissolve away. Now if I could just have the same light bulb moment with sharpening for print. I also did a quick level adjustments on just their iris/pupil to make the catchlight pop.