3.11. Twilight Portraits

3.10. Indoor Flash

Over the years , you've probably seen plenty of indoor flash pictures that have a pitch-black background and an overexposed , practically nuked 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, as described earlier. 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.

3.10.1. Slow-Synchro Interiors

There are two reasons why your flash shots often have a pitch-black background. The first problem is that the light from a typical digital camera's flash reaches only about eight to ten feet. Anything beyond this range, and you've got yourself an inadvertent existing-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 (page 22).

• 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.)

Now hold the camera as steady as possible. 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.

Take a shot. As you review the picture, you'll see that it looks much different than what you're accustomed to. Specifically, it has more room ambiance and background detail.

If your camera doesn't have a manual mode, all is not lost. Almost every consumer model has a setting called nighttime or slow-synchro mode. This setting is often indicated by a "stars over a mountain" icon. The intention of this mode is to let you shoot portraits at twilight, as described in the next section. But you can also use Nighttime mode indoors to " open up" the background (Figure 3-16). Granted, you don't have as much control with this setting as you do with manual mode, but you might be pleasantly surprised with the results.