I’m looking through our huge gallery of not-yet-posted photographs, looking for a good shot of Hallie to put on her webpage. The quality of our Canon PowerShot S50 is amazing. Eye-popping detail of very difficult-to-compress scenes – like gravel walkways through leafy woods. Mesmerizing detail, in fact.
Then I compare those shots to similar shots taken indoors with the same camera. Dullsville! The flash provides all of one angle for the light to bathe the scene. Everything looks flat and boring. On the other hand, the indoor shots I took with natural lighting all seem vibrant and alive.
One of my few quibbles with the S50 is that it doesn’t have a hotshoe to use with an external flash. I’d love to be able to do a bounce-flash with it or something – something to add more light angles. When I use that technique with my film camera, the images come out twice as interesting, at the very least.
I love what our new PowerShot does for us now, but I can only imagine what fun I’ll have when I explore some of the manual settings and really get into the creative side of things.
(And on another note, as soon as I find a good gallery script, you can see these pics, too. Hint, hint!)
Two hints:
One, try covering your flash with your fingertip. Then try with small samples of gel, as used by high school light crews for the school play. Orange or light-diffusion will yield good results. Experiment.
Two, don’t know the canon model you’ve got, but some nikons have a hot-shoe for using an external flash. Moving the flash about four to ten inches from the lens instead of directly above it makes a difference.
Victor Marks
Dang. I skim too quick. S50, no hotshoe.
(smacks forehead, consterned.)
Shame canon didn’t provide flash attachment, it’s otherwise a great camera.
To whom it may concern:
We recommend you use consternated.
Sincerely,
Dictionary.com
Hey, thanks for the gel tips, Victor! I’d not considered that. It should help add some color to the shots, though I’ll still have the one-dimensional problem with the lighting, I guess.
The Nikons have an accessory bracket that mounts to the tripod threads on the bottom of the camera, and holds a flash off to one side of the lens, inches away from the camera body.
Unfortunately, you have to have some way to trigger that flash. Nikon has either a hotshoe or a two wire barrel connector depending on camera model.
Perhaps mounting a lamp on such a bracket would help?