Lighting Modifiers - liquidair

Lighting Modifiers

Testing lighting modifiers for portrait lighting. Each of these was shot with essentially the same setup changing only the lighting modifier used on my 580EX flash. All shots include a 430EX flash above to camera right as a hair light and a gray muslin background.

Direct Flash. Very hard light but good control. The background stayed fairly dark, but the shadows are harsh enough to require very light careful placement to get a pleasing look. This shot would not be an example of good light placement (that will be the subject of another set of tests...)
Lumiquest Pocket Bouncer Slightly softer light with significanly worse control. The background here is brighter than with the direct flash while the shadows are still hard enough to require very careful light placement. For the small amount of softening provided, the Pocket Bounder sucks up a lot of light. Flash power for this shot was the same as the silver and white umbrellas.
Silver Umbrella Dramatically softer light than direct flash with nearly as good control. The background is almost as dark as the direct flash but the shadows are now formless enough to be fairly forgiving of light placement. The catchlights from a silver umbrella are rather spidery and not terribly appealing.
White Umbrella Maybe a tad softer than the silver umbrella but with much worse control. This shot has the brightest background of the set. The catchlights from the white umbrella are much better than the silver one. The particular white umbrella I used here was not as white as you might hope for so it required a different color balance from the rest of this set.
Shoot Through Umbrella The softest light of the set with surprisingly better control than the white umbrella. Unlike reflecting umbrella shooting through the umbrella brings the light source much closer to the frame. As a result I could set the power on the flash 2/3 of a stop darker than with the white umbrella. Presumably the lower power on the flash resulted in less spill on the background. Lens flare from umbrella resulted in a loss of contrast in this shot.