I've been playing a bit lately with using flash in combination with available light for various purposes.
A lot of what I've done has been testing. For example, the following pictures I took in my car.
The first picture shows the scene as metered by the camera. The speedometer is washed-out, almost to the point of losing detail due to lack of contrast. And the sky is completely blown out.
The second picture shows the scene severely underexposed for ambient light, but I had my flash set to use high-speed sync. The shutter speed was 1/8000 of a second, forcing the flash to fire multiple times to illuminate the entire frame. Here you can see the speedometer is properly exposed, but the sky is quite dark.
In this next pair of images I illustrate the effectiveness of using bounced flash for fill. My daughter was looking out our front door while holding on to the gate (eating it, actually).
In this first picture you can see how the scene would be if it were lit only by available light. With the image properly exposed for the trees in the background, only a small sliver of Emily's face retains detail.
In the second picture, you can clearly see the effect of the bounced flash. While it's obvious that the picture is better-lit, it would be difficult to tell why without knowing. And someone who hadn't seen the first picture might not realize that any light had been added to the scene. (The same technique was used for the pictures at the top and bottom of this post.)
These last two images were taken at our church's annual Easter egg hunt. Both pictures would have had extremes of contrast, since the sunlight was very harsh. However, I had my flash on the camera for use as fill, and it saved most of the pictures I took that day.
The first picture shows how fill flash can be used to subtly reduce contrast in shadow areas. My daughter would have been recognizable, but the picture would have required extensive curves processing to get a similar result without flash.
The second picture would have left you wondering who the picture was taken of. As it turned out, my mother's smile shows up great despite her being strongly back-lit.
Sorry if this one post bored you, but it's exciting to me to see the possibilities opened - and the shots saved - by techniques like this.
