indoor lighting help..!

[ned.c]

Hi all,

I'm going to shoot a friend and her 16 month old son this weekend and am looking for any setup tips/advice as I think we will end up shooting indoors at her house. I have limited experience with indoor/flash photography and kit so would be grateful for any constructive advice. Keeping the little guy occupied and/or concentrating (yes, got toys/treats etc) means I'll need to try and work fast.

I have a gripped 40d and planning to shoot in aperture priority shooting flash on ettl, will take my nifty fifty and tamron 18-50 2.8 (will probably use this most). Lighting wise I have a 430exII, stofen difuser, off camera flash cable, large tripod and a small 23x23(cm!!) folding softbox/difuser thing and an 80cm reflector set.

I was thinking of mounting the flash with the difuser high up on the tripod, the cable will reach a few metres which indoors should be plenty based on rooms sizes there. I was playing around with this setup at home and shadows were still a lot softer when bouncing, should I be bouncing off ceiling or lighting direct? If shadows are harsh should I be adjusting flash exposure down a bit? Should I have the wide angle flip down or stofen on the speedlite inside the softbox/difuser? - will this help or make a noticeable difference?

I also noticed a more natural/softer light temp when setting white balance from auto to flash (previously thought the camera would figure this out from the auto setting but the difference was huge)

Planned to use the gold reflector in front of subject (obviously out of shot) to try and minimise shadow under chin etc and add a bit of warmth.

I am going to try for plain backgrounds and use big apertures and try and get them away from walls to minimise shadows and blur things out in the background.

Am I on the right track or should I be doing things differently? Also any tips for directing/composition/poses appreciated!!

thanks if you've read this far..

Andrew.

 

[arad85]

If you shoot on Aperture Priority and ETTL you will probably get a totally different result to what you expect. That's because when you set the mode to Aperture the camera will choose a shutter speed that will get the background correct and just use the flash for fill mode. Have a read through this: http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/index2.html You could use the custom function (I assume the 40D has it) to set the sync speed when in Av mode to 1/60-max or max sync which would help, but then the backgrounds may well be too dark then.

You may well be better just putting the camera in M mode, selecting the aperture and keeping the shutter speed high enough and letting the flash figure out how much power to output. Given the size of your softbox, I'd be tempted to try just bouncing off the ceiling.

If shadows are harsh, this means your light source is too hard (i.e. it looks close to a point source from the thing throwing the shadow). The only way around that is to make the source bigger - either with a bigger modifier or bringing the light closer to the subject.

Not sure what style you are shooting nor where in the house, but might it be possible to shoot using natural light if you have access to a couple of large windows?

Just some random thoughts....