If you happen to follow this blog at all you will probably know that I am a fan of long exposure photography. I wanted to write a little bit about long exposure, and specifically how flash can affect you picture.
Most people will put their cameras on the “Auto” setting and take a picture. If they are inside, or in dark conditions, the camera will probably use the flash. Flash can be great, but also has some drawbacks. If you know a little bit about what flash does, and how you can manipulate it, you can really change your photos.
Most cameras will slow your shutter to 1/60th of a second when a flash is used. This is fast enough that you image shouldn’t blur. When the flash fires, it has a specific range that it can actually illuminate; this combined with the quick 1/60th of a second shutter usually means that everything close to the camera will be lit up with a very white light, and everything else will not appear well in the photo. This is why a lot of pictures with flash have a white/washed out forground full of people, and an almost black background. The image below was taken on the auto setting on my Rebel XT.
Now, if you have a manual camera you can manipulate how dark setting photos are taken. The picture below was taken on the P setting ( on a Canon camera, P is just like the full auto setting, but will not pop the flash up). This picture was about a 3 second exposure with no flash. There are HUGE downsides to doing this, but if you can over come them you can come up with some really cool pictures. First of all, most people cannot hold a camera if the shutter is slower that 1/15 of a second without blurring the image. You have to set the camera down or use a tripod for longer exposures. Also, your subjects have to stay very very still, or they will blurr also. But look at the difference in the photo! What were just a few dots in the background on the first photo prove to be cars, windows and an entire background that was totally invisible in the flash photo. You can see the sky and the entire frame is viewable. It takes the picture from a very shallow and dull picture to something full of depth and color.
This final picture is a long exposure (4 seconds) with a flash (in this case it’s a 2nd Curtin Flash, but 1st would look very similar). Note how the foreground is brighter and more clear, but you also have the field of view.
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