Summary:
This article introduces the snapshot photographer to the concept of available light photography and gives some techniques to experiment with.

Details or Sample:
Most people own cameras of one sort or another and take pictures from a documentary standpoint, a photographic record of what they, their family, and their friends were doing at a given time. These ´snapshots´ are put in albums or on mantlepieces or in frames and used to remind us of those times, to serve as visual cues that take us back to that weekend on the beach or the vacation to Florida. Lots of these snapshots are harshly lit by an on camera flash, exhibiting the dreaded "red eye", or pitch black backgrounds behind flash-burnt foregrounds. But what can you do about it?

In this age of digital cameras with tons of features, there are many options, but we´re going to focus on one particular technique - one that may seem strange or counter-intuitive to those of us who´ve grown up in the snapshot age. We´ve all seen beautiful photographs taken all sorts of places - bus stations, living rooms, county fairs, and restaurants. They´re natural and relaxed and classic in appearance, shot by photojournalists all over the world. What´s the secret? Deceptively simple - no flash. It´s that simple. On-camera flash produces images that are nothing like what we see with our eye (unless you carry around a flashlight to look at the world with!) and because of the inverse-square law of light attenuation, it creates an unnatural separation between foreground and background, often robbing images of context.

If you´re thinking that it can´t be quite that simple, you´re right. The concept itself is very simple, but execution can be more difficult. The first thing is to evaluate your digital camera. Can you manually adjust the "Sensitivity" or "ISO"? If so, set it to 400, or even higher if your camera supports it. Can you manually turn off the flash? This usually takes the form of a button on the camera with what looks like a lightning bolt with the international symbol for ´no´ over it - the circle with diagonal crossbar. Once you´ve established that the answer to both of these questions is "yes", you can proceed. What you´re about to do is known as "available light photography".

Chances are the first time you press the shutter button on your camera in this configuration, the experience will be somewhat different than what you´re used to. The click of the shutter will probably be noticeably longer. It has to stay open longer to let more light into the camera to create the image. This can cause blurring due to motion; try it and see what happens. There are two types of motion blur - one that occurs when you, the photographer, moves the camera during exposure, and one that happens when the subject moves during the exposure. The first is almost always objectionable, while the second sometimes lends itself to wonderful images. It´s not uncommon to produce images with sharp faces, but hands blurred as they lift a drink or gesture in conversational illustration.

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Written by: jstevewhite
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