For most happy snappers, using the flash is only necessary when it’s dark. However, flash can be used to much more effect than just when you are in severely light limiting circumstances like night time.
When to Use It
Other than when it’s night time you can the flash to fill in shadows on a bright day, create highlights in someone’s eyes, or produce some cool or weird photos in difficult lighting situations.
The obvious usage for flash is to provide the primary source of light for your photo when no other light is available or suitable. This is the way most people understand using flash.
Many beginners don’t realize that bright sunlight is often a great place to use a flash. That’s where ‘Fill Flash’ comes in.
If you have ambient light that struggles to show up your background, then using the flash can be tricky. For instance, let’s say you have your friend posed and ready for the photograph, and behind them some metres away is a garden. When you use the flash it’s powerful enough to light up your friend but the garden comes out darker than if you didn’t use a flash at all.
Many happy snappers are happy to accept that but there are ways to capture both your friend and the garden. 2nd Sync (or 2nd Curtain) Flash solves this problem.
Fill Flash
Fill flash is when the flash is not the primary source of light for the photo you are taking.
Let’s say you have your friend posed for a nice face shot and when you take the photo it’s full of dark shadows under the eyes and around the nose. By using some fill flash you can produce enough light to soften up those shadows but not blow out your friends face and ruin the shot.
Good external flashes have plenty of control for this type of usage but even built in flashes usually have a setting in the camera’s menu that allows you to increase or decrease the strength of the flash so you can get the exposure you need. It’s a valuable tool to learn.
Fill Flash Shot
Fill Flash
2nd Sync Flash
2nd Sync or 2nd Curtain Sync Flash is a different way to use the flash from the normal 1st Curtain Synchronising. In normal flash photography when you press the shutter the flash is fired right away. If you had a long exposure set, for instance let’s say 3 secs, then the flash would fire as you press the shutter button and then the photo would take another 3 secs to complete.
In 2nd Sync mode though, what happens is the camera takes that 3 sec exposure and fires the flash as it finishes the photo.
How is that helpful I hear you ask? Well, imagine if you will that your friend is now standing on a path at night and in the background is a nice city all lit up with the building lights.
Use the flash the normal way (1st Curtain Sync) and that beautiful cityscape is going to be swallowed by darkness. This is because the camera saw the bright flash only so it exposed for a bright scene. The flash only travels a few metres only so it couldn’t light up the city as well of course.
So, by setting your 2nd Sync function on and using a tripod you can now experiment with much slower shutter speeds. You can find a shutter speed that captures the city nicely and as the cameras finishes taking the photo it flashes your friend and you have a photo of both.
Another cool advantage would be in low light, say right around dusk, where you could select a slow shutter speed of around 1/8th for example. Let’s say you are at a skate park and the skaters are rolling around and doing their thing. You take aim and snap a shot. The result might be a trail of light and blur where the skater came into frame and then a much clearer image of the skater caught when the flash went just before the skater left the frame. Experimenting with this can produce striking results.
2nd Sync Flash Shot taken in Shutter Priority Mode Taken at Shutter ¼, Aperture f2.8, ISO 200
2nd Sync Flash
