How to Diffuse Light in Digital Pictures

Video Transcript

"A lot of times when you are at a party or anytime when it is a low light situation and you have to use your flash, people just tend to take the picture and especially like if you're like me right now and you're near a background, you'll notice that you get a harsh shadow thrown on the background or even around the person's face or the line of their chin might cast a really dark shadow here. There is a great trick to get a professional more diffused light appearance with you're just plain little shoot camera. One of the things that you can do is just take a basic piece of tissue and cut it down a little bit or rip it if you're short on time or you don't have scissors around and then you can just tape this right over your flash and by doing that you have essentially created your own little soft box. It diffuses the light, it spreads it out and when it hits the subject it's not quite so harsh. A girl I know, if she's at a restaurant or whatever, may just go ahead and use the napkin that's on the table as a little makeshift diffuser. If you want to get fancy, you can bow out the diffuser a little bit. For that I like to use tracing paper because it has just a little bit more substance to it. For that I would go ahead and tape it on the bottom, being careful not to obscure my lens, and then I would bow it up over the top and that gives it even more of that professional diffused look so that when you take this picture you'll see that it actually kind of arcs the light, really diffuses it and spreads it out and you can get a great professional looking image just from taping a little piece of tissue paper on your camera."