Many DSLR users love to take photos in daylight, but they get a little confused when it comes to taking photos under artificial lights. In fact, many professional photographers find it difficult to click good photos under artificial lights. One of the most hated things in low light digital photography is using flash. Use of flash can completely spoil your photographs. Hence, you need to be careful, whenever you use flash for clicking photos. On the quest of being extra careful, few people do not even use flash. They keep faith on their skills of holding camera at low shutter speed.
Well, no matter how good you are with holding the camera, blur or shaky effects on photos will definitely come if you are shooting at extreme low shutter speed. Hence, at some point, you need to use flash for clicking photographs. Omitting it completely would not help – neither it is the smartest thing to do for a photographer. So, in this article, let us find some tips for using flash properly while shooting in low light conditions. Here are the tips for you on avoiding flash blowouts:
- Take a Step Behind
When you are using flash to shoot an object, always take one or two steps back. The strategy is letting he flash light to diffuse in the air. Shooting with flash mode closing down to the object will burn your photograph completely. It will make the photograph to look pale or burnt white. So, taking a few steps back and then shooting the object will help you to capture better photographs. Lesser flash light fall on the object when you take photographs few steps behind than usual. Light gets enough chance to diffuse in the air, and hence chance gets minimal for over lighting the object.
- Diffuse Flash Light in Camera
Modern DSLR comes with a lot of options for the photographers. You can play with different modes and settings. When you are using flash, you can control flash mode, as per your requirement. For example, you can diffuse flash light by using flash light compensation option. You can tone down the intensity of flash light as per your requirements. Basically compensation mode helps to light up flash a little early so that the light can get enough time to diffuse in the air. When you are shooting an object up close keeping flash mode on, you should alter flash light compensation carefully.
- Understand White Balance
You can control flash light blowouts with changing white balance modes. Point and shoot camera users would not find many options to alter white balance. But, DSLR camera owners have a lot of choices for changing white balance. In fact, there is a present white balance mode, named as flash mode. You can opt for this white balance setting, when you are using flash light for shooting an object.
- Night Mode
Many point and shoot cameras and digital-SLR cameras come with default night mode. You can try this mode for shooting photographs in low light keeping flash light on. Using night mode will adjust the flash light compensation automatically. As the camera shall caliber the parameters on behalf of you, you would find different results in different cases. Sometimes result may be satisfying, while sometimes they would not. However, using night mode is not a bad choice at all, especially for novice photographers.
- Tone down ISO
ISO level is generally enhanced when you are shooting at low light conditions. However, if you have decided to use flash, you should tone down the ISO a little so that photographs do not get overexposed. This will definitely help you to escape flash blowouts.
