Slow Sync Flash (a.k.a. Night Portrait Mode)

Here's a picture I took at Universal Studios in Florida on our vacation. It was dark, I popped the flash up on my dSLR and took the shot. My daughter, posing with the "heros" of the show came out great, but what happened to the background? That fantastic stage that they performed on is lost in the darkness. Dope! That didn't turn out!

Using Flash on Normal Mode -- The people turn out, but the background is lost in darkness.

Ok. The reason the background was so dark is that the flash on my camera isn't powerful enough to reach the stage. The stage is just too far away. The flash on most cameras can only reach out a few meters. So I get properly exposed people, but the background is completely lost!

What I should have done was used the "Slow Sync Flash" mode on my camera (A.K.A. Night Portrait Mode on many cameras such as point-and-shoot cameras). [I'll explain how it works below.]

So, when I got a chance to take a picture with the villans, I made sure my flash was on "Slow Sync Flash" mode and low and behold the background turned out.

Using Flash on "Slow Sync Mode" -- The people turn out, and you get some detail in the background. On some cameras, such as point-and-shoot cameras, this mode is called "Night Portrait Mode".

What to do
So, just remember, if the background is too dark, try "Slow Sync Flash" or "Night Portrait Mode" on your camera. It doesn't always work. Sometimes it makes the people turn out a little blurry because of motion blur. But its worth a shot in order to capture the background.

Why it works
In the first picture, the camera fired and the flash was able to light up everything within its 3 meter range. But since the stage was much farther away, the flash wasn't able to light it up. And since the camera didn't know I wanted that to turn out as well, it just closed its shutter after its standard 1/200 sec. shutter time. Now, on the second picture, with the camera on Slow Sync Flash mode, the camera did almost the same thing. The difference is that rather than closing the shutter after only 1/200 sec, it left it open slightly longer. By doing this, it lets the sensor capture a little more of the light being reflected off the background, letting it turn out with a little more detail in the final image.

More What to do
Now, I was just using slow sync flash in order to try to get the background to have a little more detail in my pictures. But, there are tons of creative ways to use this mode, as seen here. In the above picture, I tried to hold my camera still in order to not get any motion blur, but there's no reason why you shouldn't pan your camera around and intentionally introduce motion blur into your pictures. I'll probably write a follow-up posting on some fun ways to use Slow Sync Flash and link it here.

Take care and happy shooting!
Glen - DigicamJunkie.com


SIDE NOTE: Using flash is like taking two separate pictures at the same time super imposed into the same picture. There is the flash picture and there is the ambient light picture. Its a strange concept, but once I got my head around this concept, using flash and playing around with how it works got really fun! I'll write up a separate posting on this concept and post it here.



(C) 2011 - Glen Fujino