Flash needs to be elevated a little bit higher....see the shadow your nose is casting, and the placement of the catchlights in the eyeballs??? Your nose's shadow is going upward, and touching the other eyeball...that's not a good look. You want that shadow to drop at a downward angle. Elevating the umbrella will help get that nose shadow going down-and-to-the-side AND will position the cacthlight higher in the eyeball, more near the top of the eyeball, and not so much at the "waterline" (lol). The last two with the light coming from a low angle give you a bit of a sinister look...which would actually be VERY GOOD if you were dressed in say, a Halloween costume, or were playing a villain or criminal in a play, or what have you.
In the first shot, you can literally SEE that the face is lighted by a large light source....see the BIG broad areas of the face lighted up, and with a very,very faint white sheen (specularity) to the skin across a large part of the entire facial structure? And see the, relatively, open shadows on the shirt and the shirt front? You are being illuminated by a LARGE light source, and there are very subtle clues that show this. The reflector fill also shows; look at the shadowed side of the head, and the shadow-side's ear--clearly, there is FILL light in action!!!
On shot #2, the shadows in the shirt,m and the shirt's front show "an umbrella" light setup. See how much more "shadowy" the lighting is? See the strong, clear nose shadow? This is a sort of Rembrandt-lighting type, if we want to try and pigeonhole it into a traditional "type" of lighting setup style. Again, the light is too low to make you look your best...
Does this help? I think the thing to note about BOUNCING light off of large poster board or walls is how it tends to make the face look "bright"...it adds, basically, a WHITE SHEEN, a shine, to the skin. It depends on if the subject has oily skin, or makeup on, or eyeglasses, or not; what is going on is that the light source itself, ie, the wall with the flash blasting it, is a rather "hot" source, and it creates a very subtle degree of specular reflection, and a large area of what is called "
diffuse highlight", on the skin and other things. Depending on a few things, this look can be subtle, as it is here with just a speedlight, OR with a powerful flash unit, like say a 400 Watt-second to 1,600 Watt-second studio flash head, the effect can be that of a person being lighted up by a literal "
wall of light". A great example of the wall of light look of bounced flash is in The Rangefinder magazine's January, 2013 on-line issue, beginning on page 70. Look at the "softlight Bounced" illustration of the woman. A Norman 2,000 W-S head bounced off of a 4x8 foamcore board, which is like a white wall.
Rangefinder - January 2013
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