Strobist: Controlling Specular Highlights

It's been, oh... 3 months, since I've done a Strobist 102 assignment. I combined this lesson with making a listing to sell my Canon AE-1 and lenses. This assignment was about specular highlights, and learning to control them. Specular highlights are essentially the reflections of your light sources as seen reflected from your subject.



Ultimately, you have to use the specular highlight as another quality of your light, shaping, coloring, and diffusing it so it adds to the information and detail the viewer gets about the subject.

My subject is my Canon AE-1 camera (which is up for sale... more on my gear and its transitions later). I wanted to show off the shape of the glass and textures in the body. I bounced the flash into a wall (something I never would have considered before starting Strobist 102, I use this trick regularly now) to get a large enough light source.