Lighting 101: How to Bounce Flash | Bergen County Photographer
While there are many different lights and light modifiers available nowadays, I prefer to photograph events using an on camera flash. An on camera flash is a flash that you attach to the top of your camera, sometimes with a rotating head. I’m usually working by myself and the on camera flash gives me mobility to walk around the room photographing guests.
Used directly a single flash gives hard shadows because it is a small light source. The only way to soften the light is to make it larger. Whereas there a softboxes and other light modifiers for flash, one of the easiest ways to make the flash light larger is bouncing it.
By bouncing the flash, we not only have a larger light source, but we also control the direction of light. If you bounce the flash off a wall to the side of you, then the light source is larger in relation to the subject creating beautiful soft light and avoiding the deer in the headlights look of straight flash.
The flash in this image was bounce off the wall to the right of the camera.