With one flash outdoors you\'ll want to get it vertical off axis to avoid overpowering the downward natural modeling with flat flash.
You first need to get faces up into the skylight (sun at back) so the brow doesn\'t shade the eyes by standing on a rock, bench, ladder then have the subject look up. The you want the flash to model the face the same way from the same downward angle. Raising the flash with a bracket does that automatically and produces flattering lighting on full face poses. Outdoors there is nothing to bounce the light so you need a modifer that projects light forward and is as big as practical. Outdoors with a 430ex range is limited by power and the bigger the modifer\'s footprint the more limited the range wili be.
Indoors you need to do pretty much the same. Room lights from overhead will usually shade the eyes, and if so you want the subject looking up to get rid of those ambient shadows. If you don\'t the eye sockets will still be darker than cheeks and seem dull, even with the catchlights the flash adds. You want the flash to create the same downward modeling as natural light. The bracket makes that more or less a no brainer. Indoors where there is a ceiling you\'ll want a diffuser that bounces some of the light forward and some off the ceiling and walls to create the \"fill\" that makes the shadows lighter.
One of the pitfalls of moving a single flash sideways on a stand is needing fill for the shadows it creates. If moving off axis indoors a modifer like white umbrella that also spills light off ceiling and walls will help keep the shadow light, but you won\'t have much control of the lighting ratio (tone of the shadows) that way. Two flashes (a 580ex on bracket with the 430ex on the stand) allow better control of fill and allows putting the off camera flash behind as rim light with the one on the bracket lighting the front. That works nicely for full length and action shots.
For more info and examples take a look at my Canon flash tutorials here: http://photo.nova.org
Jan 19, 2013 at 04:21 PM
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