My photoshoot started last night (before I had the umbrellas) with us playing around in my girlfriend's kitchen. This first photo is a shot of Mark, my girlfriend's father. Here I was using only one tripod and had the other flash laying on the counter. As you can see here, the lighting was a little harsh and overpowering, but the end result was still pretty good, and the two direct flashes washed out any shadow behind Mark pretty well. This was a fluke. For the majority of the photos I took last night, I wasn't able to eliminate the wall shadows behind my subjects by using direct flash.
These next two show my sweetheart Bethany and her little sister Emily, respectively. Here you can see more of the wall shadows that plagued me. I was able to get rid of some of it in my post-processing (I was using Picasa) but it's still clear from these that a direct flash just wasn't going to cut it. 
So this morning I was off to get some equipment. First, we scrounged around the house for some umbrellas. The closest that I could find to white studio umbrellas was a single silver umbrella (used for catching rain, not flash photography). Much to my suprise, the silver umbrella actually reflected the flashed light pretty well, and it didn't cast an ugly color! So, I ran out to the dollar store and picked up another silver umbrella to match the one I already had.
From this photo of Emily, you can clearly see that the umbrellas made all of the difference in the world. This shot (and the others below) were set up with one flash on the subject's left (the right hand side of the photo) and another in front of the subject, on her right (so coming from the left of the photo). The main advantage here is that the face is illuminated by the front flash, while the area behind Emily is exposed by the back flash. You can still see just a hint of a shadow behind the xmas tree in the background, but that tree is sitting right against the wall, so eliminating all of the shadows would be nearly impossible. 
This second shot of Emily, a mug, shows more of the advantage of the two-flash system. I really like this photo, except that Em's hair is casting a shadow over her right eye. I didn't even think about hair when I took the shot, but it's clearly something that I missed.
The final photos that I have to show you today are similar poses of Bethany. Here I got lucky with the hair issue, as Bethany's hair tends not to cover her eyes naturally. In both of these shots, you can definately tell that there are two light sources, as the one on the photograph's right shines brightly against Bethany's blonde hair, while the front/left strobe light's most of her face.
One of the biggest suprises of all these umbrella/soft strobe shots is the color balance. I was really suprised at how even the flash-color was coming off of a silver $4 umbrella. It kind of makes me wonder why the pro guys spend big bucks on their studio umbrellas.That's all I have for this post. I'm sure that there will be much more of this to come (I'm absolutely loving this portrait thing), but short of analyzing every one of the 60 photos that I saved (many more were taken and deleted), I don't have anything more to share tonight.
This first photo is of my mother's Christmas tree. It was taken using natural light. Thing that I like about this photo are the nice contrast between the bright lights and the dark tree. Also, I feel like I did an adequate job of framing the photo. Unfortunately, the light distribution of the tree isn't very even, so the top of the tree is slightly under exposed. I really think that I can live with that, given the situation. Another thing that I noticed was that a 100% crop of the photo showed a lot of what looked like noise. It couldn't have been noise because I was shooting ISO 200, but who knows. I'm going to temporarily blame it on the kit lens.
This second photo is of the entire living room. Here is where I took several exposures of the identical scene using different amounts of flash. I really like the end product. I ended up using mainly natural light, and bouncing a weak flash off the right wall to 'fill' the darker right corner of the room. The result? I feel like it's an adequately even photo.
This last photo is where all of the trouble started. I took two frames of the ladies in this pose (the first shot, I forgot to set my white balance, so they turned out blue... rookie mistake). I imediately liked the result on the camera's LCD after this shot. It's a good thing that I liked it though, as the flash did not fire on the next pose, or any pose thereafter. This has happened to me once before where my old Sunpak flash just 'stops working' every once in a while. I don't know if it has to do with the batteries or what (pressing the test button still discharges the flash just fine). Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was forced to slap my FA50 f1.4 on and go to ISO 1600 for the remainder of my shots. That wouldn't have been the end of the world really, the DL takes pretty good photos even at that high of an ISO. Unfortunately, 50mm was WAY too long for anything but headshots, given the size of the room we were in. I needed something more like a 35mm or shorter to get the shots that I wanted (not that it mattered, the shots that i really 'wanted' were flash exposed shots). The moral of the story here? My Sunpak flash is less than trustworthy. I have been kicking around the idea of upgrading to a more 'modern' flash for a while now, but instead I think that I'm going to invest in some PC cables and try to do a little off-camera flash shooting.
