MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - another photography question

> no offense taken. And yes, it is more of a toy for me at the moment, but I've been
> able to take far better pictures than any other camera I've owned and I'm really
> excited about it. I picked up the external flash because I got it on sale, and I'm
> still not quite happy with my ability to get the exposure I want on night shots,
> while both avoiding motion blur, and having to set up a tripod. I figured I'd be able
> to take faster shots with the external flash than with the built-in one.

The external flash gets you more power, but remember flash falls off with the square of subject distance. If you don’t want dark backgrounds in your night shots, you’ll need long exposures. There’s no way around that. Even if you got a massively powerful flash that could light up the background like day, you’d just end up overexposing the subject.

In general, for night shots the flash captures the subject in an instant and the background is filled in by ambient light over the rest of the exposure.

You can choose whether you want the flash to fire at the beginning or the end of the exposure (rear curtain sync). This is important for subjects with light sources, e.g. a car with its lights on. With rear curtain sync, the trails of light will appear behind the car's position, but in the default mode where the flash fires at the beginning of the exposure the trails will appear in front of the car's position.

Pointing a flash straight at something can cause ugly shadows, highlights and specular reflections. This is why the flash allows you to change its angle and bounce it off walls and ceilings. It makes pictures less harsh. The diffuser spreads the light out and softens shadows, especially when combined with bouncing the flash.

Remote flash lets you illuminate your subject from a different angle and put the shadows where you want them, to get more depth sense of depth than you can with a flash on the camera. I don’t know about Canon, but with Nikon you can have multiple remote flash groups fired at different power levels to get a huge variety of effects.

Adjusting flash value compensation controls how much contribution the flash makes versus ambient light. Since flash falls off rapidly with distance, it also kind of controls the balance between subject and background exposure. Positive values increase flash contribution, and increase subject exposure compared to the background. Negative value decrease flash contribution, and can effectively cause the background to look less dark relative to the subject.

You need to think about distance to the subject, ratio of distance to subject relative to background and relative brightness of background when setting flash compensation. For general fill flash at normal distances, -1 stop is often a decent value. You might need to increase it when bouncing the flash of walls, or if your subject is further away.

If you're shooting with flash in daylight, you might come up against "high speed FP sync". This is needed when you're using shutter speeds faster than your camera's maximum X sync speed (1/250s on the 60D). To do this, the flash needs to fire continuously for the whole time the shutter curtains are moving. You get a lot less effective flash power in this mode, so you may not be able to get as much effect as you want.

Anyway, get out there and use your flash! It's far more useful than theorising about it here. Also, if you decide to read Ken Rockwell’s opinions on fill flash, be aware that while a lot of his theory makes sense, his example photos are all bloody awful. Somehow, despite having a lot of experience, theory and gear, the guy manages to take a lot of bloody awful photos.

> I'm also hours away from winning a bid on a slightly used 24-105 L lens for less than
> $500

Sweet, that's a pretty good midrange zoom. It's decent for taking photos of people, and general walkabout stuff. It's one of those "if you're only going to be carrying one lens, take this one" sorts of lenses.