After a successful trip to Morrisons - got a 220mm ( just over 8 1/2inch ) plastic salad bowl for the ring light - cost £0:69, I returned to the pop-up flash project.
The essence was to use a 4 inch square mirror to bend the flash beam, and direct it at a large reflective surface and then bounce light from that back at the subject.
Due to the limited power only G/No. 15 this takes a bit more care in setting up than with conventional set up if you are going to manage apertures in the f11 plus range to get reasonable dof. A small mirror is essential.
For this shot I used black card as a background rather than velvet, as it is cheap and easily available, in a wide range of colours from craft/art shops.
The first thing is to set up the subject and taking camera. For this I tried to make it as repeateable by others as possible so used Auto Focus. I initially fell over as camera would not fire - reason is I was just inside focussing range
, so check this before going further.
Once the subject and camera are set up then consider placing a reflective white card or such, to reflect the light from the flash to the subject. There is no need to clamp the mirror to a stand. I did it so I could do a behind the scenes shot and it was a total pain when it came to taking the pic itself. Far easier to hold the mirror with one hand and press shutter with the other. The mirror can easily be aimed at the white surface when viewing from behind the pop up.
I did not try this on programmed exposure as just as easy to do it in manual. After a test shot you can see if any reflectors are needed. AP freebees, white card, kitchen roll, in fact anything white will do.
For the record I spent longer cleaning the camera, selecting pose, and setting mirror up on stand for the behnd the scenes shot than taking the pic itself.
So Ollie you can do quite a bit with a pop-up flash. It just requires a bit of thought.
Don