Christmas Bounced OCF with Limited Gear
We just returned from Boston to see my husband's family. With 3 huge suitcases of winter clothes and boots for 4, I had to limit my camera gear to the very basics.
Although 95% of what I shot was documentary style, I knew our family always wants some traditional poses shots since we're rarely all together, and they're usually shot with someone's iphone in the worst lighting conditions. So I planned for some OCF.
Here was what I brought and my process for setup: 28-75 f2.8 tamron lens for my sony, speedlite and foot, small tabletop tripod (I definitely recommend a real one of you can fit it but we weighed in at the 50 lb limit in all 3 suitcases coming back so I made it work).
First I warned everyone the day before when we would be taking pictures so they had time to feel groomed. I did test lighting without anyone there, and then roped in my mother in law once I was ready for a subject.
The room was quite dark with high ceilings but they were white and angled, which helped once I figured out I could bounce the flash from a coffee table towards the ceiling and get some even lighting over by the xmas tree. I ended up flagging the flash a bit with some black paper since it was so close to my tripod I was getting glare back and that worked well.
I wanted enough glow from the tree so after much trial and error I realized I needed 4000 ISO which is WAY higher than I ever go using flash. I was at 1/160 which was as low as i dared go with all the ambient light in the room (maybe I could have gone lower but didn’t want any motion blur). I was at f 5.6 for a group. If I powered the flash up too much rather than pumping the ISO I lost a lot of the tree ambiance. In any case the files are still really clean so I'm happy. The tripod was trickier. I figured out the angle I wanted, then moved some furniture and used a bar stool with a bunch of big coffee table books to prop up my camera with the tabletop tripod. Not the ideal solution but it worked.
Here are some of the images....
Below is my rough pullback of positioning... excuse the terrible drawings with my mouse! The flash (yellow sketch) was on its little foot on the coffee table, pointed to the upper right side angled white ceiling (technically it was bounced directly backwards and up from camera shooting angle) Camera (red sketch) was precariously propped up on a tall barstool, pile of big books and a tabletop tripod. The flash was shooting directly past the camera due to the tight space so I flagged it (wrapped it with a piece of black paper to create a bit of a snoot) to avoid flare. We moved the chair and subjects were where green sketch is. I wanted them as far from tree as I could so I could angle flash to light them and avoid the tree as much as possible for that ambient glow. Hope that helps!
As a comparison, here's an iphone picture someone took in nearly the same spot the same night (the tree is off to the left). It was a bit later at night but the ambient light in the room was pretty similar.
