42nd Street Photo’s Flash Photography Tips

Regardless of the type of the camera you use, 42nd Street Photo suggests a few tips to improve the quality of your shots by the way you use the flash.

1. Let’s start with a simple point and shoot camera. Improve your flash photography by using the fill flash. Force your camera to flash in daytime. Tell your camera what you want to do when your subject is less exposed than the background. By forcing the flash to fire, you get your subject better exposed.
2. If you shoot flash photos at night use Slow-Sync Flash. On small cameras this would be called, Night Portrait, Night Snapshot mode etc. It means slow synchronization of the flash with the shutter. The flash will fire and expose your subject and then there’s going to be a slow shutter, it’s going to wait a while before closing the shutter. This lets the light from the background come up and make a nice exposure of the scene in the background.
3. On a DSLR camera, when using the fill flash, you can use the Flash Exposure Compensation. Thos allows you to control the strength of the flash whether you use the built-in flash or an attached one.
4. Also on a DSLR, you can put something (like a LumiQuest Soft Screen or a piece of paper) on your pop-up flash to diffuse the light a little softer.
5. Shooting with a hot-shoe flash on a DSLR is more powerful then shooting with the pop-up one, so you can fill much bigger spaces with light, photograph large groups of people and so on. The actual quality of light is not that much different than a built-in flash but it’s still a hard point source of light. But you gain more not with the flash pointing at your subject but bouncing off the ceiling, it;s like being lit from a big panel from above. This works best in room with white walls and ceilings.
6. Finally, use the same hot-shoe flash but position it off-camera and point the flash from different angles, using some kind of diffusers to soften the light.

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