Thursday, May 01, 2008

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Flash made easy
Slip an accessory flash into your SLR's hot-shoe, crank all your settings to auto, and you'll immediately get better pictures than you would with your camera's built-in flash alone. But exert just a bit more control, and you'll take your pictures to a whole new level--no lightmeters, flash triggers, or stands required.

Without taking that extra control, you end up with those typical flash snapshots: Sure, your subjects in the foreground are properly exposed, but more than likely the background fades to black. That's never good. Whether you lose a dramatic sky or the interior of a room totally disappears, your subjects look like they're hanging out in a cave.

The trick to overcoming this problem is to set your camera so you know the background will look the way you want it, then let your flash fill in the foreground--without overexposing your subject. Sound hard? It isn't, because of a little miracle setting on your flash called TTL. TTL stands for "through-the-lens," and it means that the flash fires a pre-flash and uses that, along with information from the camera's meter, to figure out how much light to put out.

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