In order to get professional looking photographs, you need to manage your flash better
Clicking pictures is a favourite pastime these days, and everyone and their uncles own digital cameras. Most of us here at Digit have entry-level cameras, which do their job quite well, providing you shoot outdoors or in brightly lit scenarios. A lot of us seem to have one complaint: why can’t we get natural looking photos when using the flash?
We took a picture of a willing colleague, and enlisted the help of our in-house professional photographers to find out what was wrong. We were told that the photo was over-exposed with too much light from the flash. We decided to solve this problem once and for all by making a flash diffuser, and made sure we did it in a cost effective way. This was to ensure that anyone of you could replicate it at home quite easily. In what follows, we’ll walk you through what we did.
Getting Started
We came up with two ways in which to go about making our own flash diffuser: the first involves using an ice cream cup, while the second uses a regular cigarette packet. We’re going to tell you how to go about doing both so that you can choose the solution that you find easier.
Equipment
- Transparent Ice Cream Cup / Cigarette packet
- Scissor / Paper Cutter
- Butter-paper / Aluminium foil
- Cellophane tape (transparent or translucent)
STEP 1:
We sliced off the base of a transparent Ice-cream cup. 
For the cigarette pack, we sliced off the bottom of the packet using a paper cutter.
STEP 2:
We then cut a piece of butter-paper to fit the cup and pasted it on to the inside using cellophane tape. 
We removed the silver foil from the cigarette pack, cut aluminium foil and pasted it on the inside.
STEP 3:
We lined the lid of the ice cream cup with butter paper; if you have one without a lid, just cover the opening with butter paper. 
A little smoothening of the aluminium foil and the cigarette pack diffuser was ready.
STEP 4:
We then mounted the cup flash diffuser on the pop-up flash of the camera.
The cigarette pack flash diffuser has the advantage of being adjustable so as to offer us more or less flash as per requirements.
The Results
Both the flash diffusers were a snap to make. The resulting photographs are displayed at the beginning of the article so that you can compare the differences. All pictures (before / after) were clicked in exactly the same ambient lighting within minutes of each other. You can also use coloured gelatin paper and line the insides of your cup diffuser to get some psychedelic filter effects. Happy clicking!