Built-in flash vs External Flash
Photography is originated from Greek language, “photos” which literally means light and “graphein” which means drawing. In other words, it means drawing with light. Lighting is the most important part of photography and there will be times when you will need additional light sources. For example, pop-up flash (or flash featured in every camera), it can only provide a very limited lighting. It does not give you more room for creativity. Then it will be the exact time where you will need external flash.
There are six reasons why you need to take the advantages of having additional flash with you to develop your ability in photography:
1. Flash lamp is able to face more directions
One of the issues of having the built-in flash only is the fact that it can only emit the light from the front part only. Another weakness of it is that this flash light can only shine on one part of the photo only (to the middle) which can make the object look too bright while the surrounding is too dark. Apart from that, this built-in flash has relatively low power.
With additional flash where the lamp can be rotated and tilted, you can get rid or fix the minuses of built-in flash. Because the flash lamp’s position can be adjusted (up, down, right, left, and etc.), you can reflect the light and spread it so it will not get too severe when it reaches the object. You can use any kind of surface surrounding you to reflect it like wall, ceiling, a reflector, and etc.
If it is for a certain reason, you got nothing to use as a surface to reflect the light (for example, the wall is too far or the ceiling is too high) you can fix this problem by setting the angle of the flash lamp in variety of tilt (45, 60, 75 degrees) so most of the light from the lamp will not fall onto the object. This will also help the object from fierce dazzle. Read the rest of this entry »
