Photo Gallery

wordpress plugin

Monday, August 16, 2010

Tip 1: Fill Flash Why Should I Use Fill Flash?

My friend, blogger, Kevin Hing, purchased a nice camera- Nikon D300s and asked for some tips he can use while he is in Ireland.
First tip, put me in your luggage, Kev :)
These tips may be useful for beginner photographers too.
Before you buy a camera, do your research to make sure that you are buying the product you need. A good source for this is DPReview.com and their review of the Nikon D300s is quite good.

1. Fill Flash
The on-camera flash can be useful when shooting a subject in low light or shadow. In this example, my subject was backlit, so her face had no detail in the first image that I shot without flash and using ambient light.


There are various ways to "doctor" this image, but the easiest is to use the on-camera fill flash. If the light is to harsh looking, you can place a tissue/Band Aid over your built-in flash to soften the light. Try it with the tissue and without and see which one you like it.

• you can also control the amount of fill flash falling on your subject's face by the distance you stand from the subject. If you are closer to your subject, you let in more light; if you are farther away = less light -- use the zoom feature of your camera to pleasingly frame the subject's face regardless of the distance between the two of you

• the objective of the fill flash is to "fill in" just a little to enhance the quality of light already falling on the subject's face -- fill flash can be used in direct sunlight or open shade to augment available light

In the second picture, I used on-camera flash with a tissue. As you can see, the subject's face has details now.


In order to reduce the disturbing light shining through the window behind her, I zoomed in on her face in the third photo because she is the subject of my image.

Experiment with this technique before you go out to take fill flash portraits.













Here is an image where the fill flash is too harsh.All the images in this post were unprocessed.
An example on Fill- Flash photography is Apple bobbing.

No comments: