How to Improve Your Flash Photography

Most people I know are against flash photography saying that the results look very unnatural, the photos are washed out and just bad in general. While I think there's some truth to that, and I always prefer shooting in available light with fast lenses, sometimes using a flash is inevitable.

The best solution is obviously a separate unit because it gives you many more options, but you can definitely take some great pictures with your on camera flash as well, you just have to know how to use it properly. In this article I give you some on camera flash photography tips and techniques that will make your photos look better, and I also demonstrate these with some pictures.

This is the original scene I'd like take a photo of: a cup and a box on a table. Let's try shooting it without a flash, only using available light in the kitchen. I'm using a 35mm f/1.8 lens with my camera set to Aperture Priority mode.

Not too bad, but there are several problems. First of all, our main subject is underexposed a little bit. This is inevitable, because if we expose for the cup, the background will get blown out. So what are our options here? We could take two or three differently exposed images using bracketing, and then combine them in post production (as I explained in my exposure blending tutorial). That's a very viable option if you're shooting still objects, but it's not plausible when taking photos of people.

The second problem is that to achieve a usable shutter speed, we had to bump up our ISO to 2000. On consumer grade DSLRs, that's usually usable (barely), but the picture is going to be very noisy (and it's only going to get worse if your lens only has a slower aperture, which most kit lenses do). We'd get a much higher quality if could shoot at let's say ISO 100.

Fortunately for us, it's possible to solve both problems at once: use a flash! Let's try shooting in green auto mode first and see what happens.

Yuck. This isn't looking too good. While the foreground is correctly exposed, the background is too dark, and the whole image just looks very out of place. To get rid of the dark background, there's a technique called slow sync flash. Basically, we're going to use a slower shutter speed to get some ambient light in, illuminating the background.

To do this, set your camera to manual mode, use ISO 100, and select a combination of aperture and shutter speed that underexposes your scene with only ambient light by about 2 stops. That means your shutter speed has to be four times faster than the normal exposure (still pretty slow though, remember, we're at ISO 100). Now pop up the flash and take the photo.

Much better! There's still one glitch though: notice how hard and defined the shadows are on this picture. This often happens when using flash, and it looks bad and unnatural, especially when shooting portraits. The reason of this effect is that our light is too hard, which is no surprise since it comes directly from the flash.

If he had an off camera flash, it would be possible to bounce it off the ceiling or the walls, but since we don't, we're going to use a diffuser. It's really just a fancy word for anything white and semi-transparent. I put a simple paper in front of the flash while shooting, so the light became softer.

It's pretty easy to see the difference I think. One note at the end: sometimes using flash and ambient light at the same time messes with the white balance, so shoot RAW, and you don't have to worry about it too much. If it's not quite right, just tweak it in Photoshop or Lightroom.

After reading this tutorial, I hope you won't be afraid to use your on camera flash in the future and you pictures will improve quite a bit. If something's not entirely clear, please ask your question in the comments.