I hate those shadows. Shooting in an auditorium or gymnasium, with high ceilings and nothing useful to bounce against, these are always a pain to work with. I've not found that the on-flash diffusers help very much, even the LumiQuest big-bounce. Oh, they do help some, but they're just not really big enough to spread the light out relative to the subject.
My solution is a bit of business to manage, really should have an assistant. I bought a 6x4 foot piece of semi-translucent white plastic sheet at a local plastics supply shop and rigged a simple frame for it using a boom, a lightstand and a couple sand bags ... liberally treated with gaffers tape. I set it up over my position and pump the flash up into it, aimed at the subject from as close a distance as I can manage to get them all in the frame. If it's not enough light, I put a couple more lights on stands pointed into it. (manual flash techniques at that point...) With a couple of pops to get the exposure right and a small flash pointed directly to get some sparkle, it helps kill the black outlines. It works well for group shots in those locations. On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 9:30 PM, Boris Liberman <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi! > > The holidays are coming near and I'm having a couple of gigs at > Galia's class. One involved shooting the general rehearsal of the > little musical they've been making. Given the fact that the hall was > empty I could shoot as I pleased. So I also shot a number of shots > from the distance. > > My flash is Metz 40 MZ-2 which is a good flash. In particular it > auto-zooms as per the actual focal length taking into account the crop > factor of the camera. However, the ceiling of the hall wasn't the > ideal surface for bouncing and the distance (10m and upwards) was too > much to play the bounce game. So I ended up with many properly exposed > shots but with this ugly shadow behind everyone and everything. > > Is there a way to at least make these shadows less prominent during > the shoot? I reckon the likes of diffuser are necessary but I'd rather > ask someone who has direct experience with this, as I am total klutz > to all things flash. > > Thanks. > > -- > Boris > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
