SEARCH PIXBOOMBA

Phun with Phil Phlash

Using fill flash for better photos.

Sometimes a silhouette is just the ticket, like the picture at right. It becomes a graphic image of black shapes against a gorgeous sky that is more interesting than an image showing details in the kids and the huts. The shapes and colors provide impact. (And I swear I did NOT use any filters. The sky really was that color.) Same for the picture below, of the boy silhouetted against the sky and rainbow. The trick in photos like these is to expose for the lit part of the scene—in both these examples, the sky. Expose the background properly and let the other elements go black. If I’d exposed for the boy untangling his fishing net, the sky and forest on the other side of the river would have been totally blown out, and we would never even see the rainbow.

But there are times when you want to preserve some detail in the subject, and that’s when you use fill flash. It allows you to keep the brightly lit parts of your frame properly exposed and adds just enough light to your subject to bring out some detail. But not too much. Usually you don’t want the image to look like a flash picture. When fill flash is done well, most people don’t realize a flash was used at all. Like in this picture of a cemetery next to an oil refinery in Louisiana and the picture of the sleeping anaconda in Venezuela. Without fill, the main subjects would have been devoid of detail and muddy.

Fill flash is especially useful if you are photographing a dark subject like the black bear cub below left. Or when your subject is in shadow, like the Marine at right. I needed to show him, his machine gun, and those really big bullets. But I also needed to show the landscape and the food convoy he was escorting. So I used enough fill flash to light the foreground elements in balance with the landscape outside.

Okay. So here’s how you do it: Modern flash units and cameras talk to each other. If you just put your flash on your camera, turn it on, and fire away, it will put out enough light to expose your subject (or whatever the light bounces off of, usually the closest object, even if it’s on a side of the frame) properly for the settings the camera has told it to. Like in the photos below. The camera was set at a shutter speed of 1/200 and an f-stop of 9. The flash said, “Okay, I understand,” and put out light for that setting. Since Yari was closer than Cary (left), the light bounced off him back into the sensor on the flash, causing it to cease its output. The flash smugly thought it had done its job. Flashes are smart, but not smart enough to know I wasn’t interested in lighting Yari. So I moved to get Yari out of the frame and tried again. This time the flash lit Cary for a proper exposure. Problem is, both images look like what they are—flash pictures.

So what to do? Control the output of the flash. Most flash units allow you to control the amount of light they put out relative to the settings on the camera. Usually this is up to ± 3 stops in increments of 1/3 stop. That means that you can tell the flash to put out up to three times as much light as the camera settings (if your camera is set at f5.6, the flash will blast your subject with enough light to illuminate it for f16, and it will be REALLY bright) or to put out as little as a third of the light the setting calls for (it will throw out only f2 worth of light when the camera is set for f5.6).

I rarely have occasion to set the flash for three stops over or three stops under. When I’m shooting with fill flash, I find a good place to start is 1 1/3 stops under. But it all depends on how dark your subject is, the contrast between your subject and other parts of the frame, and how far away you are from it. The best way to learn how to do fill flash is to practice. It’s easy. Put a friend or an object in front of a bright window. Leaving plenty of window in the frame, take a picture without a flash. The contrast between the light outside and the light on your subject will usually be so extreme that one or the other will be lost—the subject will be a silhouette or the window will be blown out. Or you will be somewhere in between and both will look terrible (it depends on what sort of metering system your camera uses). Now put your camera in manual mode, walk over to the window and set your camera to properly expose the scene outside. Go back to your previous position, turn on your flash and take a picture. The scene outside the window should look good, but chances are there’s too much light on your subject and the picture looks “unnatural.” Adjust the output of the flash to -1 stop. Take a picture, look at it and decide whether you think it’s too much or too little light. Adjust the flash output accordingly – have it put out less or more until you get what you like. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you exactly how to adjust the output of your flash because different units have different ways of doing it. Look in the manual for your flash. It will be under a heading like “Flash exposure compensation,” “Setting flash output level,” or something like that.
Here’s an example: Cary as a silhouette, with a little fill flash, and with a lot.

It works with landscapes too:

Fill flash (and flash in general) usually looks best if it is diffused. If you are shooting indoors, you can bounce the flash off a wall or the ceiling to diffuse it (just aim the flash at the wall or ceiling). If no wall is nearby, the ceiling is too high, or you are outside, you can use a diffuser like a small translucent plastic cap that fits over the flash. I find these really handy and quick. And a tip: put a piece of very faint orange gel over the flash head. It warms up the light.

Practice a lot. It may not make you perfect, but will certainly make you better. And practice in situations where the contrast is not as extreme as in the in-front-of-a-window exercise above. Sometimes you need to add a just a little light to your subject(s) so you can see what they are doing, like these gold panners in Venezuela.

Or so you can really capture someone’s expression, like this picture of Leon Fleisher playing the piano.

And fill is useful for tricky situations like inside this nomads’ tent in Nepal. I had to add light so we could see what the women were doing. Full flash would have overpowered the light seeping through the woven walls of the tent, which I also wanted to show. By using fill flash, I got both.

And sometimes you need fill flash just to give a little life and vibrancy to a scene. Jesus Rivas and Renee Owens were catching anacondas one day (doesn’t everybody?). The weather was absolutely horrible—very dull and gray. But I had to get some photos for the story I was doing. So I used just enough fill flash to brighten up the colors a bit and got something usable. Without the extra light, the photos would have been boring indeed.

Here’s another example of how fill flash affects colors. Exactly the same photo with and without fill. Mind you, sometimes you want soft, muted colors. Other times you want vibrancy. Depends on the subject and the mood you want to convey. This is just to show you that you can have control over the look of your images.

There’s also a way to use fill flash in motion photography, but we will do a separate TipsFlick and Actual Info about that—it’s important to get the hang of regular fill flash first.

Don’t be intimidated by fill flash. It’s really pretty easy to do, but takes practice to get right—and that just gives you an excuse to make lots of pictures! Generally, expose for the background, then adjust your flash to add light to your subject. Sometimes that means quite a bit of light, other times just a smidgen.

The important thing is to learn how to make your pictures look the way you want them to.

All Actual Info and TipsFlix