[CT]

I've always had an uneasy relationship with camera mounted flashguns, being forced to use them in wedding photography situations indoors where the flat modelling and harsh shadows they can produce is less than pleasing. The answer of course is to use bounced flash. It makes me smile in all the manuals and photgraphic books,where they show the pretty girl conveniently sitting in a corner with a white wall and white ceiling off which to bounce the flash. In real life this never happens, the walls and ceilings are any colour but white usually, and the bounced light picks up whatever colour it is and paints it all over your shot including the skintones - not nice at all. With film and bounced flash, the other big problem of course is you can't see your results straight away as you can with digital, so you tend to do the time honoured thing and bracket like f*ck!

Even when you cart portable flash umbrellas around there's always that faint worry about whether you've got it right or not, particularly when they're important shots, and it's always something of a relief (or not) when you get the prints back.

With all this in mind, I've been playing with my newly acquired 580EX and taking some test shots.The following two shots were both taken indoors with flash being the sole illumination at 1/250th sec. The first is direct flash mounted on camera, the second is a flash shot mounted on camera but bounced off the ceiling with one stop extra exposure compensation. Both shots exhibited noticeable colour casts from the walls and ceiling, but both have been corrected for WB via raw processing.



As you can see, the first shot has the harsh shadows and loss of modelling associated with direct flash, whereas the second shot appears much more natural and shows far more modelling.

I wont be worrying too much in future about the colour of surfaces I bounce my flash off as RAW processing makes it so easy to correct any casts afterwards, and it's another major advantage in shooting in RAW format. Coupled with the ability to preview your shots on the spot and make sure you got proper illumination, it's another major advantage of digital photography, and another reason I wont be returning to film any time soon.