Week 10

Apologies for not posting earlier. 

 

Flash Modes

Tonight after all these weeks of me telling you not to use on-camera flash, I asked you to look at the flash modes and force the flash on. If you're stuck, it is normally achieved by pressing the button with the lightning flash on it.  Successive presses of this button will cycle through the modes available.  The common modes are No flash, Flash always fires and Red eye.  I personally would not bother with the red eye setting.  Here's why.  The red eye setting normally fires pre-flashes to encourage the pupils of your subjects to close down, thus reducing the likelihood that their retinas will reflect light back into the lens.  You may find that your subjects think that the pre-flashes indicate you've finished taking the photo and start to move away just as the camera takes the real shot.  I'm also dubious about its ability to constrict the pupils.

Another mode that you may see is slow, slow sync, rear or rear curtain. These are all the same name for the function that is usually explained in this way.  Suppose you wish to capture the shot of a car at night with its tail lights streaking behind it.  You need a slow shutter to capture the streaked lights and a flash to capture the picture of the vehicle.  So the shutter opens, captures the lights, and  just before the shutter closes it fires the flash thus freezing the car.

Photo by Pianogram                               

 I'm sure you'll need to use this mode all the time, now you know about it. That said it is also useful for capturing a scene at night.  Suppose someone is standing in front of a city scene with lights lighting the buildings and you wish to capture the scene. The shutter needs to be open of a long exposure to capture the lights but that will not be enough light for the subject, this is where a touch of flash helps.  If you had just left the camera to us flash and fast shutter, you would capture the subject but there would probably be just a black background. 

Fill Flash

Fill flash is when we use flash during the day to fill the shadows with some light. Ideal if you subject is back lit.  So now  you know how to force the flash on, see if you can experiment with it in backlit situations.   Another thing we looked at was how to turn down the power of the flash.  By delving deep into the menus on some of the cameras that were present this evening, we eventually managed to find the flash compensation setting on them all.  Some compacts may not have this feature, but you can control the power of the flash by stepping back two or three paces and using the zoom to zoom in on the subject.

Being able to control the power of the flash is useful when you need to turn it up higher.  The situation came up in the next part of the session when we used some plastic drinking cups  to cover the flashes on the cameras.  A definite difference was noted  as can be seen in the two shots of the cello head here. 




The one on the left is with straight flash, and gives hard shadows, the one one the right is with a plastic cup diffuser. Over the flash and resulted with a softer light.  I did brighten the shot on the right in post – production, but equally could have turned the power up on the flash.

Next week we'll look at these techniques again and see if we can use them to our advantage.