I got myself a 430EX last month, but I needed practice on an assignment before I can be assured of my skill. Therefore I offered my service for free to a friend who is attending her prom night.
I read all about using a flash unit properly, I even made a DIY diffuser by binding some styrofoam papers onto the flash unit like this:
I learnt this technique from http://www.abetterbouncecard.com Very useful. Let me share with you the outcome of this assignment.
It was a flash-bounce photographer’s worst nightmare came true. The ceiling was matte black in colour! Check this out:
I bounced the flash anyway, and the result was mixed. As you can see from the picture below, the flash was quite harsh, although it was not pointing at their faces directly. Their oily faces were shining like neon light!
Also, since bounce was not useful, light fall off from the flash was quite severe.
The ladies at the back row was obviously not getting enough light. :O
Here is a sample taken outside of the venue, on the lobby area. The ceiling was white, and the lighting turned out great!
Here are some of the vital photographic information that night. My main lens that night was the 50mm f1.8, interchanged with 18-55 kit lens in my Canon 350D body. Mostly taken in JPEG, with a lot of post-processing done. Taking a dinner event like this requires a lot of memory space. My 2 GB card could not hold all the pictures, even in JPEG format. Therefore taking them in RAW was not an option. Since most of them wore black, the metering was thrown way off. I had to post-process most of them to bring back the correct exposure.
Let me share with you guys one more of my pic taken that night. I consider this one of my favourites. Taken without flash this time.
For your info, everybody arriving at the prom gets to be accompanied to their tables by the committee member. How come they never do that in my university days? *sigh* 🙁
More pictures can be found here : http://picasaweb.google.com/jackyyon…FarewellDinner
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