Blue eyes

Like any doting Dad with a 300d and a little baby, I take a lot of pictures of my little girl. Most of my pictures are taken either indoors at home, indoors at grandparents', or at our local park. When indoors I'm using a 550ex mounted on the camera and bouncing, and very nice it is too.

My one complaint, which I'm looking for help with, is the fact that you can never really tell that her eyes are blue from the photos. Sure, if you ramp up the brightness so that the rest washes out, you can see it, but obviously I don't want to do that.

Should I be looking at reflectors to get the light to her face, or is there some Photoshop jiggery-pokery I can do to sort this out better?

There's an example here https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=31094 if you want to see what I mean.

Simon,

I've looked at the posted link and I see what you mean.

Good overall exposure using bounce of the 550EX but you need some more light into the face. The hat is probably not helping, but she is so cute with it on, lets not go there yet.

I would suggest using a small piece of white card stuck to the top surface of the flash head (use rubber bands to hold it) and then angle the head upwards as normal for bounce. Some of the light will reflect off the white card and go direct to the face rather than all of it going up off the ceiling.

You may have to play with the card size and angle of the head to get it right.

That is the el-cheapo way of doing it. And it is the way I do it as I only have one flash.

Alternative you could try is not bothering with the white card at all and try the diffusion panel on the camera. Instead of pulling it all the way out and folding it down on the flash face, just pull it out almost all the way so that it stands proud. This is a way of using bounce flash but still putting a little light directly to the subject. My results with this have varied.

The expensive way is with two flashes (or more). With two flashes to would use the big flash to do the overal lighting and then a smaller flash on lower power directly to light her features, but in a way that doesn't mean her face gets washed out.

Cheers

Ian

There actually is a quite recent thread graphically depicting what Ian just said.

Voila: https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=30977

But ... that photo you posted in the other thread ... you definitely have to try to work that one out in PS (e.g. selecting only the eyes or face for levels), as it's such a sweet expression on your daughter's face. Congratulations!!!

Best regards,
Andy

On the other hand ... too bad you already have the 550 EX ...

... cause if you only had the 420 EX, we would most likely have persuaded you to get an additional 550 EX and use the 420 EX as a slave, that's how this forum works ...

Best regards,
Andy

Andythaler wrote:
On the other hand ... too bad you already have the 550 EX ...

... cause if you only had the 420 EX, we would most likely have persuaded you to get an additional 550 EX and use the 420 EX as a slave, that's how this forum works ...

Best regards,
Andy

Brilliant

Ian really let the side down by only advocating a piece of card!

LOL, I visit another forum about headphones at the moment, and the standard greeting to anyone new to the forum is "welcome and sorry about your wallet".

Actually I'm more likely to do the Photoshop thing that the card thing just because... well keeping track of a baby is hard enough without additional complications. I might try that pulling out the diffuser trick though, thanks for that tip.

I'll see if I can work out how to select just the eyes for levels. I'm always a bit wary of selector tools, as it's starting to rely on manual dexterity, of which I have none

We'll see. Thanks for the tips guys.

My suggestion is to allow your kid to chew on a 50mm, preferably the 1.8.

(lighting is the answer, as others noted)

Ilya,

he looked happier with that 70-200

Not allowed to use the Canon camera:

one thing that will help is on the 550 you have a flap you can pull out over the main flashlight. This is used for wider angle shooting. You can also however pull it out and leave it sticking out (as oppsed to letting it flap over)at a right angle so some light gets bounced straight.

I took this to PS and tried color correcting it with Levels, a little shadow highlight, bumped up the blue saturation then sharpened it. this is what I got.
here is the address...
http://www.pbase.com/i​mage/28521079
I hope you don't mind
Eric
I can't seem to be able to link directly to the image

I think the easiest thing to do with your situation would be to bring the subject outdoors on an overcast day and meter for the ambient light and then shoot with your flash just a couple tenths of a stop over the ambient reading to fill in the dark parts of the face. Bracket your shots one stop if you worry about your exposure being incorrect.