Using a Flash Indoors
Over the years, you’ve probably seen plenty of indoor flash pictures that have a pitch black background and a washed-out, overexposed subject. Many factors conspire to produce these stark, unflattering shots, but one of the major contributors is, once again, your camera thinking on its own. You’re letting it decide when to turn on the flash and which shutter speed to use.
First of all, you don’t always need the flash. Indoor photography offers many opportunities for stunning existing-light portraits and moody interior shots. And when you do have to turn on the flash, you can make certain adjustments to preserve the ambiance of the room so that your background doesn’t fall into a black hole.
Flash shots may have a pitch-black background for a couple of reasons. The first problem is that the light from a typical digital camera’s flash reaches only about 2 to 3 metres. Anything beyond this range, and you’ve got yourself an inadvertent ambient-light photo.
If your camera has a manual mode that allows you to dictate both the aperture (f stop) and shutter speed, you can easily overcome these problems.
Once in manual mode, try this combination as a starting point for flash photography indoors:
• Set your film speed to 100
• Set the aperture (f-stop) to f-5.6.
• Set the shutter speed to 1/15th of a second.
• Use the forced-flash mode. (Don’t use the red-eye reduction feature)
When you use these settings, hold the camera as steady as possible or better yet, use a tripod. At these slow shutter speeds, your shots are more vulnerable to camera shake, and therefore to blurriness. Your flash will help freeze everything in its range, but the background, not illuminated by the flash, may blur if the camera isn’t steady.
If your camera doesn’t have a manual mode, all is not lost. Almost every consumer model has a night time or stow-synchro mode (look for a “stars over a mountain” icon). The intention of this mode is to let you shoot portraits at twilight. But you can also use Nighttime mode indoors to open up the background. Granted, you don’t have as much control with this setting as you do with manual mode, but you may be pleasantly surprised with the results.
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People Pictures: How to Really Get Rid of the Dreaded Red Eye
For years now, film and digital camera manufacturers have been forcing red-eye reduction mode on their customers. Its a series of bright, strobing flashes that’s not only annoying to the people you’re photographing, but doesn’t even work very well.
What causes red eye? In a dimly lit setting, the subject’s pupil dilates, revealing more of the retina. The back of the retina has blood vessels over it, hence the red colour that is caused when the flash bounces of the back of the eye.
On cameras where the flash is close to the camera lens (as it almost always is), the light from the flash shines through the dilated pupil, bounces off the retina, and reflects as a red circle directly back into the lens. (the same thing happens to animals, too, except that the colour is sometimes green or orange instead of red.)
The fix is to move the flash head away from the camera lens or use bounce flash. That way, the reflection from the retina doesn’t bounce directly back at the camera. But on a camera that fits in your pocket, its not practical to achieve much separation of flash and lens.
Since camera manufacturers couldn’t move the flash away, they went to Plan B: firing the flash just before the shutter snaps, in theory contracting the subjects’ pupils, thereby revealing less retina.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well, and you may wind up with red eye anyway. The other problem is that some people see the pre-flash as the picture being taken and then move while the shutter is open. Not a good result.
Basically you have three ways out of red eye. You can turn up the lights to help contract the subjects pupils. You could also use a camera that accepts an external, detachable flash. And if none of that works, remember that you can edit out red eye on your computer, using for example, the red eye reduction tools offered in many photo editing programs.
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