Flash Features
September 11, 2008
Light is the major source for photography. An adequate light can give more details to the subject. A subject and place (ambience, surrounding light) plays an important role for shooting a perfect photography. Three major criteria determine the brightness of picture such as shutter speed, aperture setting and flash modes you choose. Under this criteria flash modes plays an vital role and it varies with different kinds of digital camera.
Consumer oriented digital cameras has inbuilt flash that operates in different modes and they are considered to be the basic flash modes. In addition to these automatic modes flashes are presented in four different independent modes such as fill flash, no flash, red eye reduction and night time flash also known as slow synchronization flash.
Fill Flash
Fill Flash is mainly used for outdoor shoot. When a photograph of a person is taken under bright sunlight, a black shadow will appear around the subject face and those details will be immerged into dark. So the picture will not be clear and it projects a simple object with no details. If you switch to Fill Flash mode then this mode will flashes some additional light on the subject face and bring more tonal details of the face.
No Flash
As the name implies this mode uses no flash on the subject. In case of shooting flat and more reflective objects such as metals and glass that has no tonal details and has completely white on surface, then No Flash mode helps to avoid the unnecessary reflection by flashing no lights on the subject. When you select No Flash mode then the camera will reduces the shutter speed to compensate for dim lighting.
Red Eye Reduction
When you take a picture of a person using point and shoot film camera the flash will reflect on the subject eye and results in red glint on the eye. Red Eye Reduction mode will solve this problem by projecting low power flash before the real flash going to take place. So this low power flash light will tend to close the iris of the eye ball a little to avoid the reflection. Before taking a picture of a person let him know the sequence of flash that happens to avoid red eye so that the subject may not think that preflash is the real flash.
Slow Synchronization mode
Slow Synchronization mode is otherwise called as nighttime mode or nighttime flash mode. When you focus particularly on the subject then the background goes beyond the reach of the flash and become dark. Slow Synchronization mode takes more ambient light by increasing exposure time beyond the normal time resulting in lighter background on the subject. It also works along with the shutter speed. If the shutter speed is less then the image will be brighter. Normally camera uses higher shutter speed to allow flash light to be used as primary light rather than surrounding light. Slow Sync mode uses slow shutter speed to allow more ambient light to enter into camera so the background looks brighter than when you take picture using normal flash mode.
External Flash Unit
High end digital cameras have a provision for separate external flash unit that can be fixed on the horse shoe of the digital camera or by socket which connects camera and flash via cables. The external flash unit looks like larger flash head on many professional digital cameras. This larger flash head produce narrowly focused beam of light on the subject than a built-in flash. You can control the angle and the intensity of the light in external flash units. If your camera has no provision for external flash unit it does not mean that you cannot add additional flash unit for your shot. There are different kinds of external slave flash units available to work along with camera’s built in flash but they are not directly connected to the camera. External slave flash unit flashes its light automatically and illuminates the subject when camera’s built-in flash goes off.
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