Flash!!!!! It's Photography.

I take a lot of available light shots. I hate the way the flash makes my photos look. It's like taking a bucket of white paint and splashing it all over the Mona Lisa or something. It's just ugly to bath everything in white light and create a unnatural bluish tint. I prefer the soft shadows and the natural look of available light. Give me a wide aperture and available light to shoot my shot. Give me an f/1.8 50 mm over any F/3.6 - F/5.6 zoom lens any day. I'll get nice DOF and the right look. Nothing like a portrait with the face in focus and the fall off behind the ears. I love that look.

The truth is I never really knew how to use a flash on the camera. I started taking photos like everyone else. A little point and shot 35 mm that my grand mom got for me. Use the flash inside she'd tell me. Use the flash it's night. And I always got . . . Well you know what I always got. Those vacation shots a lot of people have. Those family snap shots of Aunt June or who ever. Yuck!!!

So I'm looking at Adorama at the Pentax K20D. I'm going though the Pentax flash on the site and they explain it, all of it. I learned a lot. Why all my photos looked unnatural. I learned when to use the flash even in Sunlight. it was great.

What I learned is that light has 3 qualities. Of course I learned this over time. Some times my photos look warmer (photography word) due to the light. You call that color quality. Some times you use a single light source (AKA Lamp) to create shadows and drama in an image. The definition of direction. Light has a 3rd quality called intensity simply put how bright it is. I have 2 real problems in my past flash photos. Simply the range of the flash is about 3 feet for optima and 15 feet to be out of range. My problem is I put things to close or to far. I need to take my photos at about 3-4 feet if my prime source of light is my flash. I also need to use auto white balance when I'm going to flash. it doesn't take on a blue look of being cool.

I need to remember that due to the direction straight at my target there will be no shadows in my picture. I need to make sure that the other the other sources of light compliment this. This is called fill flash you do this on a sunny day when the sun is at your target's back. You use this to remove unwanted shadows and dark areas.

I'm going to go and take some cool photos now that I learned this and look up the range on my Canon.