A Saturday semi-tutorial for hard lighting situations

I don't usually drop by on Saturdays anymore, but today is an important exception. ;)

This morning, while everyone else in the house was still sleeping, I decided to take picture of another porcelain doll from my mom. This is the one I'm going to keep; I gave the other one to Emily when I discovered that the one I'd chosen before was the one that she'd wanted to choose.

Anyway, so I was taking a picture of the doll with the lights off, including the sunlight: there seems to be dark clouds over the sun today, and it is RAINING in Utah in January. This is the kind of weather I love for January, but it sure is crazy for Utah to be so accommodating.

So, of course I had to use my external flash to raise the shutter speed from over one second to compensate for the darkness. The first few pics I took were just getting the lighting where it needed to be, by looking at the histogram and making sure I wasn't loosing anything off of either side, by being too light or too dark.

Voila! I got the lighting where it needed to be and here it is:


Bleck! Right? That's what I thought. The harsh shadows and the stark, cold light wasn't what I was going for. So, I placed my hand in front of the flash (about 2 inches away) so that the flash could reflect off of my hand, but not take away too much of the flash, and here was the result:

Much better! Don't you think so, too? And the same technique will work for a pop-up flash too.

I just wanted to stop by and share my success and perhaps help someone else with their tricky lighting situation too. :)

Have a wonderful day!