When in doubt, be crafty.

Over News Years Eve, I went up to Utah to visit family, and also to visit my friend Hailey. We wanted to take pictures while I was there, but it was way too cold outside to even consider standing outside for a long period of time. Hailey and I decided that pictures inside would be the most bearable, but once the window light was gone I knew that resorting to the unfavorable built-in camera flash was the only option for non-blurry pictures.

Built-in flashes have the infamous power of making everyone look bad in a picture. They reveal every blemish on a person's skin. They reflect on glasses, eyes, etc. The list can go on and on. In my situation, I was inside, at nighttime, with not very much indoor lighting. A photographer's nightmare! This is when my inner craftiness had to come into existence. First, I needed some sort of light diffuser, to lessen the strength of the flash. Household items that are translucent: paper bags, paper towels, toilet paper, most other paper products. First, I made a cone out of a paper towel and placed it over the flash. The result was decent, but not quite what I wanted.

Here is my attempt to recreate the paper towel cone:

Yay! Diffusion!

The paper towel cone wasn't enough, so I had to get even more crafty. I knew that if I reflected light in a different direction, the picture wouldn't look so washed out. Reflective household items: compact mirrors, foil, ...shiny stuff. I couldn't find a compact mirror, and even if I did, taping a mirror to the camera was a little overkill. So on to the next option, foil. What I made is too hard to describe, so here is another attempt at a re-creation:

(I am aware of the fact that it looks completely ridiculous)

Comparison

Without flash:

With flash:

With paper towel cone diffuser:

With foil awesomeness:

The MacGyver within me succeeded in getting me out of my lighting predicament. The foil worked surprisingly well, and Hailey and I were able to successfully take nice pictures INSIDE AT NIGHT! Here are a few of the best ones taken with the foil flash (with little to no editing!). All of them are taken inside of Hailey's room, with her door as a background.

Moral of the story: you don't have to spend a bunch of money to get nice indoor lighting for pictures!