Just my ideas...
-Mat
Simon King wrote:
Hi All,
I've been having a problem recently with eye highlights - or rather the lack
of them, and wondered if anyone had any suggestions.
A good example of the problem I've been having are some photo's of my son in
the bath over the weekend. Here are some rough scans from the prints... http://members.iinet.net.au/~celsim/bath/bath.htm
The bathroom has a white ceiling, so I used a camera mounted flash directed
to bounce off the ceiling and trigger another slave set up to give plenty of
light. With the camera set up in portrait orientation I also attached my trusty
white plastic card to the flash in an attempt to get an eye highlight (see
bottom of web page). I shot at 1/125, f/11 and f/16
All the shots were taken via remote so I could both keep an eye on him and
have him relax and play naturally.
It didn't work - only the tiniest light reflection (see enlargement on second row).
What's wrong? I generally don't use full frontal flash because of the dreaded red-eye and the flat look of it. Is there a general rule about how far the flash needs to be from the lens axis to avoid red-eye but get a highlight?
Where possible I use an umbrella, and have always been pleased with the results, but there are times where it's not practical to set it up. I thought of the following options; Increase the size of the bounce card. Have him look more toward the camera. Use direct flash as well as bounce.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Cheers, Simon
