Over the years, youve probably seen plenty of indoor flash pictures that have a pitch black background and a washed-out, overexposed subject. Many factors conspire to produce these stark, unflattering shots, but one of the major contributors is, once again, your camera thinking on its own. Youre letting it decide when to turn on the flash and which shutter speed to use.

First of all, you dont always need the flash. Indoor photography offers many opportunities for stunning existing-light portraits and moody interior shots. And when you do have to turn on the flash, you can make certain adjustments to preserve the ambiance of the room so that your background doesnt fall into a black hole.

Flash shots may have a pitch-black background for a couple of reasons. The first problem is that the light from a typical digital cameras flash reaches only about 2 to 3 metres. Anything beyond this range, and youve got yourself an inadvertent ambient-light photo.

If your camera has a manual mode that allows you to dictate both the aperture (f stop) and shutter speed, you can easily overcome these problems.

Once in manual mode, try this combination as a starting point for flash photography indoors:

• Set your film speed to 100
• Set the aperture (f-stop) to f-5.6.
• Set the shutter speed to 1/15th of a second.
• Use the forced-flash mode. (Dont use the red-eye reduction feature)

When you use these settings, hold the camera as steady as possible or better yet, use a tripod. At these slow shutter speeds, your shots are more vulnerable to camera shake, and therefore to blurriness. Your flash will help freeze everything in its range, but the background, not illuminated by the flash, may blur if the camera isnt steady.

If your camera doesnt have a manual mode, all is not lost. Almost every consumer model has a night time or stow-synchro mode (look for a stars over a mountain icon). The intention of this mode is to let you shoot portraits at twilight. But you can also use Nighttime mode indoors to open up the background. Granted, you dont have as much control with this setting as you do with manual mode, but you may be pleasantly surprised with the results.

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