Flash Photography Techniques

The flash unit built into most cameras gives you the ability to take a photograph whatever the light conditions. That's the good news, unfortunately the resulting picture often appears far from natural with washed out foreground and dark background. When photographing people this equates to ghostly pale looking individuals with a muddy dark background. To reduce battery consumption camera manufacturers limit the strength of in built flash units. Even DSLRs have relatively low power with a guide number of 12 being typical, using 100 ISO this means that at 10 feet from the subject an aperture of f4 is required. Compacts have less power often having a limited range around 16 feet even when the ISO speed is increased.

There are a number of steps you can take to make sure you get the best results possible from your camera's built in flash. An improvement you can easily make is by using photoshop or similar program to lighten the shadows and darken the highlights of your shots, this will reduce the contrast and give a less harsh appearance. Another way to lower contrast is to soften the flash light, this can be done by placing tissue paper folded a few times in front of the flash. To hold the tissue paper in place use an elastic band if you have a pop up flash or adhesive tape when using a compact. Our tests using tissue paper showed that the improvement in contrast was very noticeable with the skin tone looking smoother and a weaker shadow behind the head. One disadvantage is the range of the flash will be reduced.

flash covered with tissue paper

The slow sync flash on cameras is a way of making the most of the available light . When you press the shutter button in this mode the camera fires the flash and uses a slow shutter speed and large aperture to add existing light to the photograph. There does have to be a reasonable level of ambient light  for it to be effective. Normal rules apply for shutter speed (28mm - 1/30, 50mm - 1/50, etc), the subject should be relatively still or blur will be apparent. Set your camera to Aperture and the flash to slow sync, use the widest aperture. If the shutter speed indicated is too slow you could put the camera on a tripod or increase the ISO speed. The picture below taken with slow sync you will notice has no shadow behind the head and the background is well lit when compared to the normal flash.

normal flash

slow sync flash

The flash in your camera is ideal for use as a fill-in on those days when the sun is strong causing heavy shadows on your subject. In extreme cases you won't be able to see any detail in the shadows but a controlled burst from the flash will improve the result. If your camera has a  "fill-in" setting use this otherwise set it to "forced flash". Try the camera without any adjustment to start with, check the LCD to see the outcome. If the exposure isn't correct increase or decrease the flash in 1/3  stop  steps until the correct balance between the ambient light and flash is found. Another use for fill-in flash is when photographing back lit subjects to add light in areas that would be in shadow.

no flash

fill-in flash

Although in built camera flash is far from ideal, the techniques described will help you enhance your results. While none of the methods are difficult to master we would recommend that you experiment with your camera before taking important photos. You'll be surprised how impressive your flash photography can be!