Lighting a bounce card is easy, right? Right… IF you know the basics. Here they are.
Is bounce light really just about aiming a light at a white card and walking away? No. There are a couple of tricks to getting the most out of your bounce source, and I can show them to you fairly quickly using a 4’x4’ bounce card as an example.
First thing to consider: material.
- Foam core is slightly shiny and may cast a very subtle hard shadow in addition to a nice soft one. Sometimes this is okay, sometimes it’s not. Just know that this can happen and pay attention to when it works and when it doesn’t.
- Gryfflon is slightly shiny but overall a good soft bounce material.
- Bead board is a styrofoam-based material with a very matte finish. There is no specular kick of the type seen when using foam core or gryfflon.
- Show card is dull and very matte while also being flexible. It’s good for tacking to walls or shoving into corners.
There are many other materials to experiment with but this will get us started.
We use “active” (a bounce card lit by a dedicated light, as opposed to “passive,” which picks up light that’s already in the scene) bounces when we want to turn a surface into a light source in order to create very soft, wrap-around light. The size of the source makes a difference. For this reason we almost always want to fill our bounce card completely with light. Spotting a light into the center of a 4’x4’ bounce card gives us a 1’x1’ source, which has a very different feel from a 4’x4’ source.
