Print a Free and Effective Flash Bounce Card. and good-looking bounce card. The bounce card template is provided by LADIG. Have a favorite DIY photography hack? A bounce flash for your dSLR camera delivers more uniform light to your photos. Here's how to make one using simply a business card and a pair of scissors. Technorati Tags: photography, lighting, flash, bounce, diffuser, diy, make. Use the paper shape as a template to cut around. How to Make a DIY Flash Bounce. DIY Flash Bounce Card - Cheap and Effective. have created a template for a flash bounce that you can print out and attach to your camera.
Flash - DIY Bounce Cards and Flags. By David L. Tong. In our last article, we touched on the subject of how to control the direction of light for beautiful portraits that won’t appear like an unplanned, direct- flash photograph. We know that we can swivel and tilt most flash guns to alter their firing direction, but unfortunately, even if you point the flash head to a certain direction, there will always be some light spilling from the edge of the light beam as the fresnel lens in front of your strobe scatters light in a pre- determined pattern. You can have greater control with where the light is travelling using basic physics and common sense. The easiest, cheapest, and most portable way to achieve that would be through do- it- yourself bounce and flag sheets. Before I go further, the use of bounce and flag cards aren’t new ideas as they have been around since portable, swivel heads were invented. Their applications are nothing new, but with today’s access to faddish accessories, many people don’t bother with traditional techniques and fall for modern marketing flash gadget attachments instead, even if the former is more effective. The size you want/need will depend on your shooting style and flash gun size. The examples I’m providing fit most modern flash heads. Materials required: Something to block/reflect light – You can use cardboards, illustration boards, thick paper, or my preference, foam paper. The reason why foam paper is preferred is foam paper is durable and highly malleable. You can roll it for a shorter card, you can get it wet, you can fold it without worries. Also, get foam PAPER, not foam BOARD, as the board can’t be bent. They’re a bit hard to find if your place doesn’t have a good arts and crafts store, but keep trying. Scissors or Cutter – Well, duh…Ruler – Most folks won’t need this, I’m an idiot with straight lines, so…Cutting Mat – So you won’t slice your nice dining table (care to guess why I brought this up?)Velcro or elastic bands. To attach the card to your flash. Let’s get started. Here are the two pieces of foam paper, one black for flagging, one white, for bounce, I used Foamtastic sheets from Nicolecrafts. The foam paper’s size is about the same as a Letter paper size (8″x. They’re cheap and easily found in kids’ arts and craft websites like Nicole Crafts. If you’re based in Singapore, they’re available in Art’s Friend in Takashimaya or Bras Basah. If you’re from the Philippines, sorry I have no clue. If you’re still confused as to what foam paper look and feel like, just think of those small, giveaway foam jigsaw puzzles that stores give out for free, or those alphabet shape foam that kids use. Image Courtesy of Craft Creations. Now we measure. The Canon 5. EX II flash head covers about a third of teh paper’s short edge. If you curl the edges, you’ll have a good idea how much you need to trim off. I suggest trimming just above the top edge of the flash. Being the craftsman that I am, I “tried” to measure but still ended up cutting the foam paper short. The reason why you want to make sure you’re covering the edges well is to prevent light from spilling off the side of your flash. This is important if there are people standing close to you who are not being photographed, your flash will be quite annoying to them. Anyway, mark where the edges of the flash are with a pen and those will be your cutting points. We will now trim the sheet so we’ll get a trapezoidal shape. I left the black foam paper underneath so the white sheet is more visible. From those two marks you made in Step #2, draw a line all the way to the top corners of the foam paper. Again, you can see how “good” of a cutter I am. Next, we need a way to attach the foam bounce sheet onto the flash. I chose to use velcro as my wife and neice won’t give me their elastic hair straps. I prefer Velcro to make it easier for me to ‘stack’ one sheet over another if the need arises, as well. I suggest you stick the rough, “hook” side of the Velcro onto the flash and use the softer, felt- side of the velcro as a strap so you won’t scratch your flash body when twisting the card around. I cut off a strip of Velcro about the width of the card for some “adjustment” leeway onto the bounce card. The photo below is incorrect as I stuck the soft side instead of the rough side. I found out the hard way so I’m telling you NOT to use the soft side on the card itself. I then stuck the hook side of the velcro onto the mounted strip and wrapped the card and strap around the flash head. Trim the rough Velcro so that you can wrap the strap all the way around with little effort. You’ll end up with something like the image below. Both sides of my Velcro has double- sided tape, which makes it really ugly. So try to get Velcro straps without adhesive from fabric stores instead of art- stores. As you can see, my white card is short on the sides, that’s NOT how it should be, make sure yours go over the edges of the flash. I can teach you photography, but can’t teach you how to cut a straight edge. I then trimmed the foam paper down to about 4- inches above the flash head as I’m not a big frontal- flash bounce user. I just wanted a larger bounce card than the one included with the flash unit in case the need arises. Do the same with the black flag (I’ll explain what it’s for later.) but make it longer than the white card’s height. Please ignore the fact that I still screwed up the measurement and the black flag is still short off the edges! Now let’s talk about what they’re for. As mentioned previously, the white card is a bounce card. It allows the flash to fire upwards while the bounce card will throw light forward at the same time. If you read the last article about light direction, you’ll remember that firing a flash up towards the ceiling will soften the light but will cast shadows under the eyes and such because the light is travelling from the ceiling towards the subject. The white bounce card will throw light directly forward the subject but with much less intensity, just enough to lift shadows. The advantage of using a foam material is you can control how much light goes forward by reducing the height of the bounce card. The lower the card, the lesser the light directed forward. The black flag card (or half- snoot) prevents light from traveling forward if the flash head is pointed at different angles. It forces the light to travel a certain direction only, preventing spillover light from hitting your subject accidentally. This is very useful when you want to introduce distinct directional lighting when you’re bouncing the light off surfaces. The open top allows some light to hit the ceiling to lift the ambient light a little without affecting your subject’s lighting too much. As a combination, you can add a small white card in the middle of the black flag to throw more light to the open area of the black flag. You can also check out A Better Bounce Card videos for more information. With such bouncing tools, you can say goodbye to unflattering pin- light, direct flash, and say hello to nice, directional, figure- shaping photos. If you want to see how the pros do it, check out Neil Van Niekerk’s site : ). The Party Bouncer is Back in Business (Card)Yet another small internal flash bouncer. I really like this one since it is the fastest one to make yet. I’ll estimate about 1. If you are a big executive and have your own business card, you can cut the time it takes you to get a business card and you are at 5 seconds. The results are not professional and there is some light lost, but when all else fails, it is a neat trick to have up your sleeve. It will defiantly work for Canon internal flashes. Other brands – you might need to adjust a bit. I got this trick in the mail from Marko Helenius. He holds a nice gallery at markohelenius. Pleae go over there and have a looksy. Judging by the (small number of) studio shots, this guy knows what he is doing. Now I give the floor to Marko. I’ve been countless times in a indoor situation where the hint of light is just not enough to shoot even slightly sharp portraits from friends and family and you just know even without trying that the use of integrated flash in SLR would end up in a catastrophe. At one time I came up with extremely simple, cheap and diy Party Bouncer. All you need is a white business card and a pair of scissors(knife, sharp edge, nail etc). Make two cuts on the other end of the card and install it to the metallic hinges of the integrated flash. You might even consider an angle near 4. Cardboard is great material for this Party Bouncer. Most of the light bounces from the card into the roof, creating nice overall illumination, while some of the light penetrates directly through the card, disperses and lights the subject from the front. Test photos below show the amazing overall light. First photo is shot with integrated flash and second photo with Party Bouncer attached. Direct flash tends to burn areas in front and leave very hardand visible shadows. No Bouncer – Everyone is sad. Party Bouncer Installed – Man, It Rocks! The coverage test images below were shot with 1. Sigma wide- lens approximately 1. Party Bouncer. The coverage with Party Bouncer looks very scattered, but for example with the Canon 5. In this case, the direction of the light is more important that the coverage. Party Bouncer doesn’t look professional at all, but can give you great photos when all hope is lost. PS: few pointers that came up 3am – You cannot get Canon 3. D and 4. 00. D to take a picture of each other in the exact same moment with remote ir switch. It’s easier to shoot through a mirror if you want to get a picture of the integrated flash in action (4. D has slightly smaller flash latency). You cannot use the radio trigger transmitter as support piece in the picture if you want to similarly actually use the studio flash. Related Links: – 4 ways to bounce a flash– Flash Mounted homemade DIY Softbox– Instant Lightsphere – The Emergency Diffuser– ACE of bounce.
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September 2016
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