David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Fire the Flash

As you can imagine, blurry shots are mostly a problem in low light, such as indoors or in the evening. After all, in bright light even a fast shutter speed, and even a smallish aperture, lets in enough light to make the sensor happy.

So here's one quick way to eliminate blur: Use the flash.

As long as your subject is close enough to be illuminated by your camera, the flash neatly solves the blur problem—by solving the shutter-speed problem. The flash provides enough light that the shutter can snap quickly; there's no time for the camera (or the subject) to move, and therefore there's no blur.

There's a huge problem with this approach, though: You wind up with a flash photograph. Often, that's a totally different beast, resembling nothing like what you were seeing with your eyes. For example:

• If you're too close to the subject, the flash blows out the picture, turning your best friend into a ghost face that looks like it was photographed during a nuclear test.

  

• If you're farther than about 10 feet away, the flash is too weak to do anything useful at all. (This means you, school-play parents.)

There are some ways to tailor the flash (see Ways to Control the Flash). And sometimes, you have no choice; you have to use the flash. Other times, you want the flash to fire for certain special effects; all of this is described in Chapter 6.

In the meantime, though, when you're trying ...