I totally suck at indoor/flash photography

[BarbV]

I need some tutorial 101 on using my camera indoors/with flash.

I have an Olympus E-520 and Olympus FL-36R Flash.

All my indoor pictures have big shadows. And when I play with trying to take low light shots for "effect" my flash keeps jumping in and taking over.

Yes, I'm a total neophyte to DSLR. I was feeling pretty good about my outdoor shots during the summer. But now that winter is here and most shots are night-time, all my pictures look crappy

Can anyone point me to to a good link for indoor photography?

Many thanks

[OsmosisStudios]

How big of a room are you in?

Recently, I was able to use my flash pointed straight up and bouncing off the ceiling and shooting in RAW so that I could fix any issues later. It worked very well.

[Mr Guy]

Originally Posted by BarbV

I need some tutorial 101 on using my camera indoors/with flash.

I have an Olympus E-520 and Olympus FL-36R Flash.

All my indoor pictures have big shadows. And when I play with trying to take low light shots for "effect" my flash keeps jumping in and taking over.

Yes, I'm a total neophyte to DSLR. I was feeling pretty good about my outdoor shots during the summer. But now that winter is here and most shots are night-time, all my pictures look crappy

Can anyone point me to to a good link for indoor photography?

Many thanks

I'm not sure where the best place to start is really, if you try and jump into the strobist, you may actually be overwhelmed, but it is a very good resource when you're ready to move on from basic flash photography to more controlled effects.

Really, it sounds like the very first place YOU need to start is with your camera's manual, followed by the top two all time favorite recommended books:

Understanding Exposure
Light: Science and Magic

I say your manual first, because it seems like you may need to understand your settings to even really begin experimenting, and then those two books will help you figure out why you're getting the effects you're getting. I don't know of any tutorial that compares to the knowledge I got from them.

I'll give you the basic techniques you need to think about here though. First, you need to look in your camera's manual (or magic lantern book on your camera) and your flash's manual for these two things:

1) How to turn off automatic flash -- To keep it from flashing when you don't want. This is simple, make sure it's off when you don't want it, and on when you do.
2) How to adjust your flash compensation -- To keep your flash from overpowering. Basically, your flash will try and "correctly" expose the scene, and you can tell the flash "No, I want this to be +2 (two stops brighter) or -2 (two stops darker)." That's the MOST basic thing you need to know to experiment with using your flash as fill flash.


Then, in the books, you'll learn about how the size of a light source effects how "soft" the light is. Hard shadows are causes by small light sources, soft shadows by big ones. All that matters is how big the light is RELATIVE to the size of the subject. That's what bouncing a flash is all about, and what the purpose is of diffusing a flash with any number of methods. It makes the light spread out more before it hits the subject, making the light softer.

Those two books will give lots of information on different methods, it may be way too much at first, so I recommend reading some, playing with it, reading again. It's digital, it's free!

[Samanax]

This is a good web site to learn about using on-camera flash effectively.

Here's another web site you can check out too.