Mirror Trick

[pentaxpete]

Mirror Trick by Peter Elgar, on Flickr
How to get around the 'direct light' from a built-in flash -- hold a shaving mirror or something similar as shown then you can BOUNCE the flash off a white ceiling and get wonderful soft lighting with no black shadows behind the subject ! On MY tests the subjects came out with a 'warm' colour balance which can be corrected in software as usual. Photo Credit to my Beautiful Lady Assistant !

 

[GTG]

Thank you, I appreciate your advice and tips

 

[Mr Badger]

How about using a piece of cardboard covered with aluminium foil instead; lighter to hold, storable in a camera bag and less likely to break and provide 7 years bad luck if dropped?

 

[Kodiak Qc]

lighter to hold, storable in a camera bag and less likely to break and provide 7 years bad luck if dropped?

You're really win the point here!

 

[chris malcolm]

Or the shiny inside of a snacks packet. Here's a photograph of me bouncing my pop-up with the shiny silver inside of such a packet in a pub whose only lighting (apart from camera flashes) was candles. In fact the direct up bounce turned out not to be the best. The best was when I angled the bounce a bit further back so that half of the reflected light was coming from the whitish wall behind me, the other half from the ceiling.

Crisp_packet_bounce by Chris Malcolm, on Flickr

Here is the resulting portrait.

Bounced pop up flash portrait by Chris Malcolm, on Flickr

 

[Bobsyeruncle]

Can you show us the results?

 

[HoppyUK]

The problem with the pop-up flash is it's very low powered. The problem with ceiling-bounce is it needs a lot of power.

 

[riddell]

A mirror is a really bad idea to use as a bounce, as you often end up with 2 reflections with offset.

This is caused by the simple fact that some of the light reflects of the front of the glass, whereas some passes through the glass and then reflects of the reflective mirrored surface.

Someone else mentioned using card covered in tinfoil, but why not just use silvered card instead?

The snacks packet is actually a pretty good way of working. I've done similar with menus, napkins or anything else to hand when I'm using something crap like a camera phone.