After the opening of presents of Christmas morning, my two puppies were exhausted. They chewed the paper off the boxes containing their presents (chewy toys and beef snacks), and that takes a lot of energy. To capture this sweet moment, my wife first put the bows on their heads and then I used bounce flash. The family ceiling is 20 feet high, so I raised the ISO to 640 and that enabled me to have a good exposure. Since the back of the camera was parallel with the plane of the dogs and the paper, depth of field wasn't a significant issue. Thus, f/5.6 worked just fine. Due to the distance of the ceiling (40 feet when you consider the bounce), a large aperture was really necessary due to the llght loss.
The bounce flash approach softened the light. Direct on-camera flash was too harsh and too flat for my taste. Shadows were eliminated, texture was eliminated, and in my opinion that's not an attractive way to photograph most subjects.