The Flash Book

Don’t Put Your Flash on Top of Your Camera

There are one or two exceptions to this rule (see Chapter 7), but for the most part, the worst possible thing you can do with your hot shoe flash is to actually put it in the hot shoe mount on the top of your camera. That is a recipe for awful-looking, harsh, unflattering shots. It’s basically what we do to get even with someone “who done you wrong!” (say that last line with a country drawl). Think of it this way: the pop-up flash that is a feature on some consumer cameras (notice that it’s not on professional-level cameras from either Nikon or Canon) creates the most miserable, harsh light on earth (to ...