Hi. This week I thought that I’d cover a not so well known technique that I occasionally use during some outfit shoots to compensate for some especially tricky lighting situations. It’s called fill flash, and it basically revolves around using your flash to fill in shadows on your subject when there’s harsh lighting, like when you’re shooting around noon, or shooting when your subject is heavily backlit.

It might sound counterintuitive to add more light to a photo that’s already suffering from harsh lighting, but surprisingly it works really well. To use fill flash, open up the pop up flash on top of the camera or, if you have an attachable speed light flash, attach it to your camera and turn it on.

Now, this is the key when using fill flash. Usually on most D-SLRs, there’s a way to decrease the power that your flash emits. Find the menu in your camera settings that allows you to do this and decrease the power to -1 EV {EV stands for “Exposure Value”}. If you’re using an external flash, you’ll adjust the power with the buttons on the actual flash itself.

See that lighting symbol with the +/- sign next to it? That’s the EV {Exposure Value} adjustment. Set it to -1 to begin and then adjust from there.

The reason for decreasing the power is to make the photo look more natural. Too much flash power will over expose your subject, making their skin tone and outfit look washed out. The goal is to fill in shadows on your subject while making it look like the flash hasn’t even been used at all. If you’re subject looks way too bright, decrease the flash power even more, if they still look too dark, increase the flash power.

Thanks for reading!

Andrew