Digital Camera Master

Indoors, we are often much less concerned about harsh sunlight than we are about having enough light and light of the proper color. The evil red eye is also the nemesis of many indoor photographs. For common snapshots, there’s probably nothing wrong with simply using your flash and leaving the camera in its fully automatic mode. But if you want to get really good at indoor photos, there are a few things you can do to shift the odds in your favor.

A. Use Window Light
The best light is natural light. Whenever possible, position your subject near a window so that you can take advantage of the natural light pouring into your house. If you want to try the window technique, here are a few tips:

Avoid using windows where the light streams in directly and thus creates harsh shadows. Instead, pick a window in which you get more diffused, indirect light.

Position yourself with your back to the window and turn your subject so she faces mostly head-on into the window, with some light spilling over to the side of her face.

If necessary, fill in the side of the subject’s face with a reflector to eliminate shadows. You can also use your camera’s flash as a fill flash.

B. Avoid Red Eye
As I mentioned earlier in the previous post, the dreaded red eye is the effect that happens when the flash reflects off your subject’s pupils. You can get this effect with any living subject, though (remember the Omen movies); it looks particularly creepy on dogs. Red eye happens most frequently indoors, because everyone’s pupils are wide open to see better in dim indoor light.

Once you understand what causes red eye, it’s easy to prevent. Here are the most common ways of avoiding red eye:

Use the red eye reduction mode on your digital camera This is the easiest solution most of the time. When you turn on the red eye reduction mode, your camera triggers the flash several times rapidly right before the picture is taken. When you use this mode,remember the delay between the time you press the shutter release and when the picture is actually taken—often, about a second. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to make you move the camera and ruin the picture if you’re not paying attention.

Use an external flash off-camera If you have a digital camera with a hot shoe for an external flash, or one that includes a flash sync cable port, you can connect external flash units. The Nikon CoolPix 995, for instance, lets you connect as many as five separate flash units to the camera. The cool thing about using a separate flash is that you can hold it away from the camera. The farther you get the flash away from the camera lens (to the left or right of the camera), the less susceptible your picture will be to red eye, since the light won’t reflect directly back to the camera.

Photograph people outdoors or near windows If you can arrange your subjects near a bright source of natural light, you can avoid the red eye problem entirely, since their pupils will already be closed due to the strong light source.

C. Correct the Color Balance
The color of artificial light is dramatically different from natural outdoor light. In fact, every kind of artificial light has its own unique properties. And that means that different kinds of artificial light have subtly different colors.

It is because of these variations in color that many indoor photographs simply don’t look natural. Your camera has a way to adjust for these different light sources. Called white balance, it will help you to make sure that you get natural colors in your pictures regardless of what kind of artificial light you use. If you find that the automatic white balance setting in your camera gives you unpredictable results, then be sure to read the next section, and manually adjust your camera’s white balance before every indoor photographic session.