Section 3.10. Indoor Flash

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.

UP TO SPEED
How to Really Get Rid of Red-Eye

For years now, camera manufacturers have been inflicting red-eye reduction mode on their customers. It's a series of bright, strobing flashes that's not only annoying to the people you're photographing , but it doesn't even work.

What causes red-eye? In a dimly lit room, the subject's pupil dilates, revealing more of the retina . 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 color is sometimes green instead of red.)

The solution is to move the flash away from the camera lens. That way, the reflection from the retina doesn't bounce directly back at the camera. But on a camera that fits in your pocket, it's a little tough to achieve much separation of flash and lens.

Since camera makers 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. Alas, it doesn't work very well, and you may wind up with red-eye anyway.

You have three ways out of red-eye. If you can turn up the lights, do it. If you have that rare camera that accepts an external, detachable flash, use it. And if none of that works, remember that iPhoto has its own red-eye-removal tool (Section 6.7).

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 (Section 1.2.15).

• 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.)

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 rangebut 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 has more room ambiance and background detail that what you're used to.

If your camera doesn't ave 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.

Figure 3-16. Tired of having your flash subjects lost in a black hole of darkness ? Try using what photographers call slow-synchro flash. Set your camera's shutter speed and aperture manually to control the exposure of the background. The camera's flash ensures that the subjects are exposed properly.