Original JPEG straight from the camera; flash not bounced.
Today it was raining outside, so the grand kids decided to play indoors. If I was going to be able to get some pictures of them, I would have to have a way of lighting these photos. After the usual feast of Reese’s Puffs cereal, a banana and a small bowl of ice cream for my granddaughter, off they charged to the living room for a little game of “you’re it”.
Soon enough they settled down and were playing well together with a doll house. Now, consider this – a 9 year old girl and an 8 year old boy – siblings – playing well together inside on a rainy day. Kind of unusual for siblings, eh?
Photography Challenges For A Rainy Day
Same image corrected in Photoshop; notice the lighter background.
So the trick is how to get some great photographs of these two. Outside it is dark and rainy, the gloom sinking through the two skylights into the living room; darkness everywhere. How can a great picture be taken in this lighting and situation?
Time to bring out the flash unit for the camera which, conveniently, can be rotated to bounce flash off of the ceiling. In this manner the subjects – the grand kids – can be the focus of a great photograph without having to use a high ISO and dealing with the noise it causes. However, as you can see, I was lazy today and didn’t bother to bounce the flash, I just aimed it right at them. And, what did I get? Uneven lighting in the area around them. This is one of the very best tips on indoor photography: Learn to bounce your flash off of a white ceiling or wall for more evenly lit digital photographs.
The lighting In These Photos Is Terrible & I took them only as JPEGs!
And, to top it off, I only took the photos as JPEGs. So they were only processed once by the camera; that’s it! If I had taken them in the RAW, I would still have all of the information that the camera gathered to work with for several different processing options in PhotoShop CS5.
Another example of only taking your pictures as JPEG's and forgetting to bounce the flash!
What if you only have JPEGs to work with (just as I have here), but you would like a better picture. Is there anything that you can do? Yes, a little. Just save your image in Photoshop CS5 as a PSD (Photoshops native file and the best one to do your work in so that you don’t strip your original file of pixels). Then use a light brush to go over the dark background in the picture to reveal some of the detail lost in the area surrounding the kids. After that, convert this newly corrected image back to a JPEG.
Same image as above corrected in Photoshop; notice that the background now reveals some detail.
Now, back to the picture taking: A quick snap of the scene, check out the histogram, and I can see where the shadows fall. As long as the spikes aren’t lined up against the sides of the LCD screen, and are basically in the middle of the LCD screen, we’ve got something to work with in Adobe Photoshop CS5
if a few corrections are needed.
If not, then make a small adjustment to the Camera 
I hope that you can make use of these photography tips and start getting better low light photos.
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Remember, keep taking lots and lots of photographs of your kids. You will be glad you did!
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About Betty Muscott
Betty A. Muscott is an experienced child photographer and online entrepreneur for tools to capture great photographs of children by parents and grandparents. Connect with Betty on Google+
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