Teddy Bloggie Blog Blogging

Miami Fever via Design You Trust
Photography site of Miami night life, subjects are mostly girls and fast, expensive cars. Contrasty photo candy.

Bonus photo of swaddled cats at Design You Trust:

Thinking about Miami Fever reminded me of one of the best sites for street photography:
The Sartorialist

According to Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/the_year_2008_in_photographs_p.html
Among them, this one of lightning during a volcano eruption in Chile.

Browsing craigslist today I almost bought the SB-400 flash for my Nikon, but the gentleman on the phone said his son just became the owner of a new D90 and so he was giving it to him instead of selling it. Disappointed that I wouldn't have a new flash to play with, I was inspired to make a ghetto bounce and diffuser for my Nikon D40x's built-in flash today. Inspiration came from the Smelfen and the Finnbounce found here. I also thought about buying a Gary Fong Puffer, but I wanted to see how well a DIY product would work. Warning: the following is only advisable if you eat cereal at night and watch TV from an old fashion CRT -- it's not the most glamorous setup for your DSLR. If you do this, your photo subjects might be smiling because you're taking their picture or laughing because you have a large cereal box and wax paper contraption in their face.

The basic idea is to use the built-in flash on digital SLR cameras to better effect by bouncing the light on to a surrounding surface (low ceiling or adjacent wall) or diffuse the light so that indoor flash photography wouldn't give such harsh lighting. If you buy a flash, you can point it up for the same (but even better) result. I also don't see why this freight-train-hobo procedure wouldn't work on point-and-shoot cameras with some slight changes.

The bounce card worked best and is what I would use as long as there's a ceiling or wall near:
Here's what I made using a 3"x5" card and some tin foil. Takes five minutes. Some of these shots are taken with my iphone so apologies for the poor quality.
The basic shape:

How it looks on the camera (slide cardboard stem into the hotshoe):

My first diffuser was made with 3"x5" card and a double layer of wax paper:

It works but not that well. The bigger it is the more diffuse the light would be and so I made a larger one out of a cereal box. I used a Cocao Pebbles box without loss of generalization. Cut the hole on the bottom like so:

Cut a large rectangle out and glue/tape wax paper to the resulting hole, add some tin foil to the back (why not?), and you get this:

Here's what it looks like on the camera:

I'll upload some before and after shots later...

Ok, here are some shots of me, not intending to make different faces, but soon to be replaced by a more interesting subject.

Here's the built-in flash (that face is mad at the harsh light):

With cereal box diffuser (slightly softer shadows and warmer colors):

With 3"x5" bounce card (almost no shadows -- and tada! I almost look pleasant):