Tuesday,July,13,2004
Turn off yer damn flash!
Most of the time on the camera flash is a photo destroyer!
I almost titled this posting, “How to destroy a perfectly good picture.” Partly because it would be clever, and partly because that is precisely what many people do when shooting photos using the flash built-in to their little pocket camera (film or digital).
There are several problems that can be introduced by on the camera flash:
1. Red-eye is particularly bad with a flash that is small and close to the lens of the camera. The flash on most pocket cameras fall into this category.
2. Flash generally sets your shutter speed at 1/60 of a second. Coupled with the very short effective ranges of flashes (even the big flashes costing hundreds of dollars) this results in many underexposed photos. When you see a big arena event, and you see all those hundreds of flashes going off in the grandstands, repeat after me, “screwed up photos”. There is likely enough light that the camera, were it not for the flash would be able to set a shutter speed in the neighborhood of 1/20 of a second. There might be a little camera blur to the photo, but it’d be nicely exposed.
3. Straight on flash is very unflattering for portraits, and like flourescent lighting in the bathroom at a nightclub, highlights every blemish and flaw on a persons face. Yikes!
4. Flash exposure of a subject fairly close to the camera, with a distant background at night generally results in the subject being nicely exposed against a completely black background....
5. Flash causes reflections on just about any shiny surface, which ends to obliterate detail and is just plain ugly.
So learn how to turn off the flash on your camera, get yourself a mini tripod for stability and start shooting in the dark without screwing up your photos with flash.
Yes, there are many things that can be done to eliminate some of the problems with flash, and I’ll be creating another entry soon titled, “Turn your flash ON!” where I cover such technique as slow shutter flash, bounce flash, flash diffusion, how to elmiinate red-eye without using that annoying flickering pre-flash crap, camera supports, and other nifty tricks. Unfortunately many of these things can’t reasonably be accomplished with a point a shoot camera using the built in flash.... However before I post that article, I’ll try to find some examples to include with this one.
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Posted by stevem on 07/13 at 12:40,AM
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Category: Photo Tech
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