Comparison - with and without flash

Do you Use flash to make a bright scene darker? Not necessarily!

Here's a picture of Melksham Station taken last Sunday night with the available light:

Example - natural light photograph

And here's a picture taken a few seconds later, taken with flash:

Example - flash photograph

Flash gives extra fill-in light in the foreground, and with camera adjustment it can actually cause the background to go much darker - quite the opposite of what many new photographers expect. You'll note that the only thing that's at all close to my camera in the these two shots - the blue box to the bottom right of the picture - is lighter in the flashed scene, but darker in the natural light scene. And that's reversed for the rest of the scene.

Flash is ideal for taking pictures of people / filling in close by scenes as it emphasises the close and darkens the background - sometimes to the extent that it makes a photograph that would have been impossible into one that's possible. For the scene above, though, it's counter-productive.

Footnote - there were no trains around at the time I took these pictures; the railway's guidelines for photographers state that you should not use flash to photograph moving trains and - as you can see from the pictures - it would be pretty pointless to do so anyway!
(written 2008-11-20, updated 2008-11-24)

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Some other Articles

Virtual Hosting under Tomcat - an example
Every cloud has a silver lining
Keeping on an even keel
Virtual Hosts and Virtual Servers
Comparison - with and without flash
Shopping in Melksham
Some Linux and Unix tips
Melksham Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Ruby to access web services
MySQL database from Ruby - an example

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