Bouncing with fill

I had tried taking pics of the girls while they were putting ornaments on the tree. I thought this'd be another good chance to fiddle around with my lights (much to my wife's chagrin). In the past, I would shoot this with my flash on camera, bounced of the ceiling. The pics would come out decently...


...but I knew that now having multiple lights, I could do better. You can see in the photo above that her eyes are pretty dark. I initially tried lighting this with one flash in a shoot-through on one side of the room, and another flash reflected by an umbrella on the other side of the room. I wasn't too happy with the results and quickly removed the reflective umbrella and instead made that flash bounce off the ceiling. It was a little better, but it really did depend on where the kids were--and they were of course all over the room. I turned to the strobist flickr group to get some suggestions, as I didn't want to be constantly adjusting my lights as they moved.

First off, they told me to change the position of my bounced flash. On the side of the room, it wasn't in the best place with the way my ceiling was sloping. For the 2nd flash, I had two suggestions--the first was to keep it on camera and fire it directly at the subjects as fill, and the second was to keep it on camera but bounce it off the ceiling as well. Keeping one flash on the camera helps to compensate for the kids moving about in the room. Here's the first test shot using a direct fill flash:


I had the 580 turned down as low as it would go (1/128). Not too shabby, but I still wasn't completely happy--it still has that "flashed" look to it. Not a lot, but enough that I notice it. It may be something I just have to get used to--which is tough because I really, really like a nice, soft light. Thinking back on it now, I may have to try this again using my mini-softbox on my flash. It really does fill in the shadows; so much so that there's really not a lot of definition and it looks a tad flat.

So, next I tried bouncing my on-camera flash. For the sake of comparison, I did one shot with the 580 turned off so I could see how it looked with the off-camera flash bounced:

Much better than the first pic with just the 580 on-camera bounced. You can definitely see a color cast from the walls/ceiling when compared to the 2nd picture in this post. Finally, here's a shot with both flashes bounced:


I didn't find there to be much difference between the two. Looking closely, there is a little more fill in this last shot--her cheeks are brighter, and the background (esp the bottom of the couch) looks a tad brighter. But again, not much difference. I will have to say, though, that I did correct the exposure in photoshop for the images--out of the camera the picture with just the bounced off camera flash was really underexposed compared to the last shot.

So which method is better? I kind of lean towards the look of the bounced 580 rather than the direct flash. I think I need to fiddle more with the ratios between the two flashes--perhaps reducing the off-camera one a tad and increasing the on-camera a bit will help. Maybe I'll be able to give it a try tonight :)