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Wednesday
Jul152009

Bounce With Me!

A bounce card will neutralize the tint you often get from cielings and reduce the fall-off of power.Here's a neat little item that will enhance your flash photos with the Leica Digilux 2. It will also work with the Leica Digilux 3 and both camera's Panasonic counterparts.

I wanted to take more advantage of the Digilux 2's unique on-board flash and the bounce feature. Often, though, bouncing off the ceiling produces too much fall off or an inherent tint from whatever color the ceiling might be.

Since necessity is the mother of invention, here's a little (5"x5") bounce card I made up. I made mine out of a sheet of .030 white styrene... though cardboard will work as well. My first mock-up was in cardboard... but I will say it wasn't very durable. I just got the styrene stock to make this one, so I will report later on how well it holds up. Though I'm sure it will do better than the cardboard.

Mine is made from .030 styrene plastic. Cardboard will work, but isn't very durable.The last two pictures show the difference between bounced and direct. With the bounce card in place, I changed the flash settings to full power... 2 stops over, and set the camera to Automatic at both the aperture and shutter settings. There is no post process work on either image. I think you can see that the bounced flash image is much smoother and much more natural. Portrait shots using the bounced flash as fill, produce amazing skin tones with very, very natural results.

 

With the bounce card, the light is even and you get nicer skin tones.

Without the bounce card... kind of shiny and gray.

Here's a link to a drawing for making your own. Bounce Card PDF

 

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