Working Some Magic

I have a photographic problem, and I know that most of you quasi-serious photographers are with me on this.  I hate using flash, especially indoors, and pretty much just put my camera away after dinnertime with the terrible light that is available in my house in the evening.  I can’t stand the ghostly pallor, the deer-in-headlights eyes, and the strange shadows flash creates.  So I just settle for making mental memories rather than photographic ones in the evening, and that’s okay.  Except when our family is having a fabulous time and I want to capture a bit of the fun with Daddy after he gets home.  I am always dissatisfied with those pictures, anyway, so it’s not even worth the effort of capturing them.  Sigh… if only I lived in one of those countries that gets 20 hours of daylight… but then my kids would never sleep!  Ah, well, I’ll just suffer in silence over here in Vermont.

But wait!  I remembered that about a month ago, I read a great post over at Paper Heart Camera about making my own flash reflector out of an index card.  Intrigued, and enjoying the moment while my kids were climbing all over Daddy like a jungle gym, I gave it a try.

All of these photos are unedited, SOOC (straight out of camera).  Disclaimer: my subjects were also not paying attention to me, and they’re not the best shots.  They just illustrate my point.  With my ISO at 1600, my shutterspeed at 1/20, the lightest I could get my photos was this:

 Not to mention some of them were pretty blurry.  So I popped the flash to see if I could get any better shots.  Same settings.

 Ick.

So I grabbed an index card, held it in front of my flash with my hand (Paper Heart Camera has an explanation of how to secure it to your camera if you’re interested), and angled it toward the ceiling to hopefully reflect the light indirectly onto my family.  Here’s what I got.

Isn’t that amazing!?  Scroll back up and take a look at my first photos to remind you of how dim it was in my living room and how yellowy the photos were.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

The contrast is obvious.  Buying a reflector isn’t in my budget anytime soon, and JDubbs doesn’t get home until after dinnertime.  If I want to capture memories of my kids playing with their daddy after work, I’ll have to work some magic of my own: creating my own reflector out of a single index card that probably cost me less than a penny!  The images aren’t perfect, but they’re a heck of a lot better than they were!  If you’re like me and are flash-phobic, give it a try and let me know how it goes!  I bet you’re as excited as I am about this simple trick to better low-light photos on a budget!