All too often, flash pictures come out looking unnatural, flat, or a little bit dark. Several simple techniques can be used to avoid this effect and make your flash pictures look more natural.
Raise the Level of Existing Light
If you turn on all the lights in a room or open curtains or blinds during the daytime, this will raise the level of ambient light and create more natural flash pictures. This technique will work with all cameras in all modes. In the pictures below, look at the difference made by raising the level of existing light. The picture on the left was taken in the dark with flash only. The picture on the right was taken with flash but all the lights in the room were turned on. Both pictures were taken with a fully automatic point-and-shoot camera with no changes made to the settings.
Of course, the flash is doing almost all of the work illuminating the subject. Adding room light has the effect of a “fill light” to soften shadows created by the flash, as well as providing illumination over the entire picture area.
Bottom Line:
If you are taking pictures with flash, it can help to bring up the light in the room as much as you can by turning on any lamps and overhead lights.
Raising Sensitivity
You can capture more available light when you raise the camera’s ISO setting. This is because at ISO 400 and 5.6, the camera’s sensor will pick up more existing light than at ISO 100 and 5.6 (assuming shutter speed is kept the same).
This affect is easily controlled with SLR cameras, which allow you to change the ISO without changing the aperture used with flash. Other cameras may change the aperture when the sensitivity is changed. Make a few test exposures to see how your results change as you raise ISO.
Do not raise the ISO so high that your picture quality goes down because of the noisy-grainy effect that comes with raising ISO. Experiment with your camera to find the “sweet spot” between sensitivity and noise.
Flash Modes
Many digital cameras have several flash modes to choose from giving you more control over the light in your picture situation. Here are the most common:
Automatic mode – flash triggers automatically. Turn this mode off when in places that forbid inside flash photography, such as museums and theaters.
Red-eye reduction – fires the flash several times just just prior to exposing a photo. Reduces the reflection in a subject’s eyes which produces red eyes. The rapid flashes cause a subject’s pupils to contract and helps minimize the red-eye effect.
Forced (fill-in) flash – keeps the flash on in situations where automatic mode would keep it off. Used when additional illumination is needed such as when the main source of light is in the back of a subject or shadows prevent details from showing.
Suppressed flash – turns the flash off
Slow sync (also called Night Scene)* – use to capture a dimly lit background at night. The flash fires briefly to light the foreground subject.
Flash exposure compensation – used to increase or decrease the output of the flash.
