Up Side What? Shooting Inverted

Crazy Tip Of The Day: When photographing large groups, I suggested that you photograph the subject's name badge to simplify caption writing. This insures that you'll match the proper name to the proper face.

In this venue, I had an extra camera I could use for the name badge photos, and thought I could get away with using the built-in flash for the purpose. As it turned out, the flash wasn't tall enough to avoid creating a shadow with the lens I was using. You can see that the name badge is underexposed and difficult t read. If I had a fourth speedlight (I had committed two to my shoot-through umbrella and one to serve as the commander), it would have solved the problem. Needless to say, I didn't have a spare, so it was use the pop-up, or re-configuring the commander to serves as a conventional TTL flash.

Instead, I turned the camera upside down and shot again. The shadow is still cast on the bottom of the frame, but now the name badge is fully lit.

It take a few moments to get the feel of an inverted camera, but as a quick dodge, the technique is worth remembering.