OK. Color me ignorant!
<== Ignorant
People tell me that I need more fill light on a goodly percentage of my portraits (link). I have a Quantaray QAF 6600 Zoom Bounce flash. I can tilt the head 90 degrees from directly perpendicular to the plane of media to straight up along the vertical line of the media (the head of the flash tilts up and down). The flash also has 3 settings for the hood on it so that it extends for what seems to be 35mm, 50mm and 85mm (at least those setting correspond to the numbers on the back of the flash). I've tried different settings and different angles of tilt but still lose some definition of my subjects in shadows or the shutter speed might be so slow as to miss out on 4 or 5 good poses before I catch one just right. I also have some reflective presentation board (foam-core board with either bright white or gold reflective surfaces (about $2.00 per sheet at Wal-Mart of a craft store). I still haven't tried this with a model as I normally don't take an assistant along with me on the shoots and these FCB's are light and will blow away in a decent breeze.
I'm a little stymied and I'm up for some experimentation if anyone would care to point me in the direction of a decent tutorial on "bounce flash" or "fill flash" or "fill lighting". I tried PhotographyTips.com but didn't find it helpful (perhaps I'm imprevious to some instruction--I hope not). If you have any direct experience with this type of personal flaw in your photography, please share how you overcame these silly habits to create flawless portraits. I've been shooting portraits for about 2 months now and I usually shoot around 400-1000 at a sitting and out of that I might get 10-25 decent shots that I'm not totally ashamed to show you folks or the models but I'm starting to get more interest in models wanting to use me to get some headshots or promotional shots and I definitely would like to produce as close to professional quality work as I can. I'm very willing to put in the time to gain the experience but this whole fill in lighting thing is like cyrillic to me (I can actually read some Greek so that's kinda a useless metaphor).
Thanks for your reading, understanding and the witty way with which you share your wise diwection (OK so I wike awitewation, too).
Kev
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