Week 2. Bought a new flash during the week (Nikon SB-600) and decided to experiment with bouncing light around. Result is below:-

A fairly simple setup here. The model was set up with A4 paper below and behind it (many sheets) to create a seamless background. As I used multiple sheets of paper, I had to clone out the seams of the paper. From there, due to each page not facing directly the same direction, I had to blur the background to even it out. From there, a mask was created on the background layer to bring the shadows back in.

The bounce was created by pointing the flash upwards, using the camera in portrait orientation and bouncing the light off a polystyrene which was set up out of frame on the left of the image (about 60cm or so away from the flash).

Once in post processing, apart from cloning seams and blurring the background, I removed seams from the model itself, adjusted the levels (to increase contrast) & sharpened. Slightly more work than I’d do on a typical picture, but still quite a small amount of work.

This was a good lesson in shooting models as well. I had to put the f-stop a lot higher than I would have expected. I ended up using f/8, and probably could have gone higher as the finger closest to the camera is out of focus (that said, I think the finger out of focus actually makes the image slightly more dynamic). Other option would have been focus on the finger (or slightly behind it) as depth of field tends to extend further past the focal point than it does closer to the focal point.

Overall, I’m fairly happy with the lighting (which is what I was mainly focusing on here) on the model. Not so much the background (the upper right is brighter than the rest). I could probably fix this by moving the bounce source back further and aiming it a little better (would probably need to set up a tripod for that as I was already using too many hands).