Ashland celebrated its annual Christmas parade and tree lighting yesterday as usual. It's a fun event for kids as the decorative lights make for a festive mood. This is a much photographed scene, and it almost seems obligatory to make a few frames.
Like many photographers, working with anything but natural light can be frustrating. There is a harshness to using an on-camera flash that takes the softness and mood out of a picture.
Learning how not to let the technology overwhelm us is the first thing we must deal with in making picture. This picture below was shot with the tiny pop up flash on-camera at 1/5 of a second. There are still issues with the fall-off but the panning action adds a sense of movement and dynamics to the frame. The flash not only illuminates the main subject, but also stops the action.
There are some differences working in a digital format if you are used to dealing with film. The sensor on a digital camera records and converts light into data differently than working with chemical processes. The exposures with a digital camera tend to have more contrast, which in turn make working with on-camera flash more difficult. With flash photography, contrast, the differences between light and dark, are already at increased levels unless the photographer can manage balancing the ambient light with the flash. Camera sensors in a digital format have not quite evolved to the point where the contrast differential is equivalent to film.Therefore, it is important to learn how to work around the contrast issues with digital photography.
NK Guy observes "Flash
photography has always been a very difficult technique to master on any camera
system. It’s easy to take a snapshot of your friends in a restaurant
and get that hideously blown-out rabbit-in-the-headlights look from built-in
automatic flash. But using electronic flash well - achieving natural-looking
images - is quite tricky."
Guy's tutorial on metering for light when using flash is a helpful resource for understanding how to make better pictures.
Commercial photo Neil van Niekerk dislikes the heavy shadows that comes from using flash. In fact, the heavy shadow often produce by the flash can ruin a picture. van Niekerk has learned to manage light using flash very effectively."I'm a heavy user of flash - most of my photos have
flash one way or another. But I try and hide that fact."
The first thing that has to happen to make better images is to get out of the "auto-everything" mentality. Setting the camera on manual, experimenting with light, practice, and perseverance will make a great difference in the pictures you produce.
As Mike Pasini, editor of Imaging Resource Newsletter, suggests, "slow synch can combine a bit of natural light exposure with the flash.
It simply leaves the shutter open longer than the strobe needs to fire.
And that can add detail to the background in your image."
Since we can review images immediately after capture it is easier now than ever before what works and what doesn't in photography. The best way to learn anything is to practice with the flash until the point where you know exactly what the picture will look like after capture. This takes a little time, but it is well worth the trouble.