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Comment by relaxing | Hacker News Reader

> connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject

fucking hell

“fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.

Wedding photographers use bounce flash because indirect light is flattering and not everyone is supermodel-beautiful.

I don’t know where you’re partying that the ceilings aren’t painted white (they usually are because the problem of color cast on reflected light applies to normal room lights as well) but I’ll take color balance I can fix in post over harsh shadows from direct fill flash.

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Yah you can't fix color balance from bad color cast.

ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.

I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.

I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.

Yah, you can. Get out of the 80s or whatever decade you learned paparazzi style light was a good look.

For anyone reading, soft shadows from indirect light is why professional studio setups use beauty dishes, bounce cards, and big flash boxes or umbrellas with diffusers. Bounce flash is a way to create a little of that magic when you can’t get the entire rig to a shoot, as in wedding photography.

Pointing your on camera flash directly at the subject is the easiest route you can take. How does that make every other method lazy? (Note that I’m not calling direct flash lazy - it still takes skill to balance flash power vs aperture and speed. But every other method takes that and more.)

Studio lighting isn’t natural lighting nor is it bounce flash lighting. I am specifically talking about amateurish event/wedding photographers that use bounce flash. Which have a iPhone use commonality. (You never use iPhones in studio.)

> “fashion photographer thinks all portraits should look like the red carpet” wasn’t on my batshit opinions bingo card.

“Specialist thinks the broader domain should universally adhere to the way things are optimized in their area of focus” is not an uncommon thing to see on HN, though its more commonly seen with specialists in different kinds of programming than photography.

I know, and it sucks.

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