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Originally Posted by NicoleScraps
...Pop-up flash-I know they are sucky in comparison to off camera flashes or speed lites, but this is all I have right now. I have heard people mention that these can be used just for fill light, but how?
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Turn it on and pop the flash, but make sure the power is low enough that it doesn't overpower the ambient (i.e., the background exposure isn't affected, only the shadows). That's what fill flash is.
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Do I need to diffuse it somehow?
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You don' t need to, but you might get hard-edge shadows. Diffusing is likely to make it look better, but diffusion is generally done by increasing the size of the light source. Something like an omnibounce isn't really a diffuser, unless you use it indoors, where it can throw lights in all directions to bounce off the walls (hence the name) and soften the light that way.
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Does the camera just KNOW that I want it to be fill light not full flash based on my settings? (I mostly use AV or M trying to keep the meter at 0 as often as possible).
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In Av and Tv, the camera assumes you're doing fill flash, and essentially leaves the ambient settings alone,
unless you messed with custom functions that set the shutter speed in AV mode.
In P and green-box auto, the assumption is the flash is for main illumination, and you want a shutter speed that lets you handhold.
In M, it's assumed you know what you're doing and can balance the flash/ambient for yourself.
To learn to balance flash against the ambient, the Strobist explains it far better than I can in these two articles:
Which is why my first advice to someone wanting to do flash is "get comfortable with full Manual mode shooting, first."
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Do I change the settings to underexpose a bit if I am going to use the flash like this? Or do I still try to acheive 0 on the meter with the pop up flash?
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Here's the thing. The meter can
only show you ambient exposure, not the flash illumination, too. So, setting to 0 merely makes the ambient where you want it to go. If your flash is going to affect only the subject, then you're probably ok there, but if the flash is also going to affect your background, then yes, underexposing the ambient can be good. So might overexposing the ambient, depending on how you want the background to register. It's up to you. There's no single "this is the best" exposure setting or flash/ambient balance. It all depends.
Whenever you take a photo with flash, you're combining two exposures in one: the ambient exposure, and whatever got lit by the flash. This is additive. Whatever the flash lights up will be lighter than what you'd get by ambient alone. And the flash's light has a specific fall-off pattern and reach (based on the power). The intensity of the light decreases with the distance by an inverse square law: I.e., if you get a certain level of light at a specific distance, doubling the distance gets you 1/4 of the light, and tripling the distance gets you 1/9 of the light.
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can I adjust the pop-up flash power?
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Yes for a specific value of "adjust". If you don't have a 7D, 1DMkIV, or 60D, then all you've got is FEC from the "built-in flash func. setting" menu. This is like EC, only it adjusts the flash's power level. EC and FEC are independent of each other on Canons (they interact on Nikons, iirc).
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I just feel the need to master the things on the camera before I go buying other stuff, kwim?
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I felt the exact same way. And when I did buy a speedlight, I wanted to master all the on-camera stuff and eTTL, before I went for off-camera, a step most people skip in their Strobist fever.