Capture the Light

I love all your creative posts and am sorry to add a boring one! I don't have a computer right now to upload my photos onto and so I had to look for something that would work on my photobucket. This photo is obviously a mixture of natural and artificial light. I wanted to keep the bright color of the sunset and also be able to see Adelaide and not have her a silhouette, so I used my flash.



Recently I learned about using a fill flash. Here is a little about using it.

Because camera manufacturers calibrate the flash to be used in the way people expect (as the main light source), the flash has become one of the most misused components of the camera. As mentioned, people often use their flash when they don't think there's enough light in a scene to take a normal picture, resulting in "bursty" snapshots. On the other hand, when the main light comes from another source, like the sun, or other naturally-lit situations, people don't use their flashes, leaving dark shadows under the eyes, or an entirely black area under a hat because the contrast between dark and light is too much for film (or digital cameras) to capture.

Shooting with a flash in the daytime using the flash in its default setting will burst light thinking it's the main light source (because that's how the camera was configured because that's how most people use a flash), causing an equally bad, albeit different picture. That is, the flash will burst the same amount of light as the main source, leaving a complete flat, bland and pretty ugly photo. Worse, it'll also likely be out of balance with the background or other elements that the flash may not reach (as noted above).

So, if using a flash makes for too a flat image, and no flash makes for too much contrast and shadows, what do you do?

The secret is to find that middle ground by setting the flash so that it only bursts enough light to illuminate the shadows, but maintain the balance that your eye normally sees. This is called "fill flash" because it fills in the details that would otherwise be lost because of the high dark and bright contrasts in the scene. The general guidelines suggest to reduce flash output anywhere from 2/3 to 1-1/3 stops, depending on creative control and the degree of which there is a lighting imbalance in the scene.
http://www.danheller.com/tech-fillflash.html

Here is a link with some before and after fill flash photos.
http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=106