Photo Quickies

PhotoQuickie has had mixed results using our flash indoors; either everything is washed out in bright, harsh light or our photo clearly shows the 5 meters of nothingness in front of the camera and darkness elsewhere.

Here’s a trick PhotoQuickie uses to get around the problem when taking still photos. We take a test picture with the flash off to get our camera to pick a suitable shutter speed. Then we flip over to shutter priority mode and set the shutter speed to that speed (or a little slower). Finally, we put our camera on a flat surface and use that as a tripod to take our picture without the flash.

That usually gives us the image similar to what we see with our own eyes. On the occasion that our photos still come out blurry (thanks no doubt to PhotoQuickie’s lack of surgeon hands), here’s a meta-trick.

We use our camera’s two second self-timer when taking these shots so the vibrartions of our fingers don’t shake the camera when the shutter is open. The normal ten second self-timer would definitely also work, though we think that standing there and watching our camera for ten seconds would get us some interesting stares.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 10:12 am and is filed under Tricks, Flash Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.