HowTo: Light When You’ve Left Your Gear At Home
June 15th, 2007 by Tim Solley
A few months back I was out in California to celebrate Christmas with my extended family. One day during our trip, we thought “Hey, let’s take that picture we’ve been meaning to take for months!” You know, the one where you take your six month old baby, put him in a pot on the stove, and add some vegetables? You’ve all done that photo with your kids, right?
Okay, so maybe my wife and I are just a little crazy. On Halloween we took a series of photos of him buried in a bowl of candy. He’ll surely be scarred for life for the awful things we’re doing to him now as a child. But it’s fun, so what’s a little emotional damage to our pride and joy.
But I digress. So we wanted to take this picture, but left all our gear at home except for the camera, a lens, and the 430EX flash. We had no PC cords and no Pocket Wizards with us to fire the flash off the camera. Now I know I haven’t said this yet on this blog, but having the flash on the camera is bad. Sure, it’s fine for snapshots and getting the quick shot. But if you want to take good photos, you have to get that flash off the camera. See Strobist if you want more on that. So we had to improvise a little to get the shot.
The good news is that we had just given my parents a new set of pots and pans for Christmas, and they came in a nice big white cardboard box. Instant reflector.
I had the flash on the camera, with the head pointed camera left. To my left side someone held the cardboard box (about 2 ft by 3 ft in size) about three feet away so that the flash would bounce off the box and on to my son. The large box meant the light source (the box in this case) would be nice and soft, perfect for a portrait.
That’s it. From there is was a matter of getting the exposure and flash power correct. That was the easy part. The hard part was doing all this before the cold vegetables made my son upset and brought the photo session to an abrupt end, as in the picture above.
So there you have it. If you have limited gear with you, or you only own limited gear, get creative. You can still get great shots even without all the fancy expensive equipment.
So go out, have fun, and put your kids in a saucepan!
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August 7th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Ha ha!
Now, that was a great article. Your little guy is gonna get ou when he grows up. Anyway, the improv is great, I’ll try that next time. I’m using a 20D with a 430EX shoe-mounted with an OmniBounce on top. I usually bounce off ceilings, but I’ll try this now, too!
Scott
August 7th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Thanks for the comment Scott. We had a lot of fun shooting that picture. And yes, my son will pay me back some day, probably in his teens. That’s okay though…I’ll just break out all the nekkid pictures and show ‘em to his girlfriend to fend him off.
I like to bounce the flash off the ceiling sometimes, especially when it’s desirable to light up the room better. The only problem is that it tends to give people the “raccoon eyes” a little bit due to the overhead lighting and the shadows from the eyebrow bones. So I usually opt for bouncing off a wall or even the corner of the wall and ceiling where you can have the light come down at an angle.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:44 am
Good tips, but you might want to check your white balance, there, Tim.