The Digital Photography Book

Brighten the Background Behind Your Subject

If you’re shooting indoors, and you want the light to look really natural, it’s important to balance the light from your flash with the available light already in the room. That way, the background behind your subject doesn’t go “dark,” like you see so often in camera phone shots taken with flash. The technique we use to control the light behind our subject is to slow down our shutter speed, which lets more of the available light in the room into our photo. We call this “dragging the shutter,” and it works wonders in helping you balance the room light with the light from your flash, so the shot looks ...