Flash photography tips: How to fix your photos using flash

Flash is an essential tool for any photographer - we use it to light up the darkest of scenes, to balance harsh light and as a creative choice. Your Canon camera might have a built-in flash, but do you know when and how to use it? Does it make sense to invest in an external flash for your photography journey? See five reasons why and how to use flash to help you fix common photo issues, especially while taking portraits and working with tricky light conditions.

Using flash outdoors is sometimes useful because it ‘fills in’ the shadows cast on people’s faces by strong sunshine. It’s a good approach for portraits, and can also help you see people more clearly when they’re backlit. You might sometimes see a wedding photographer shooting with flash in this way. Outdoor fill flash photography allows them to keep the camera settings for indoor and outdoor portraits roughly the same, making it easier and faster to capture sharp images.

By using the built-in or external flash for outdoor daytime portraits, you can help ensure the subject is lit evenly and the level of light cast on them matches the one in the background, especially on a sunny day.

Fill-in flash can be used indoors too. It’s especially effective when you have a back-lit subject: the flash will light up their face without affecting the background.

This way the subject is clearly visible even if the light levels inside and outside are significantly different.

Sometimes using the built-in flash as the only light source can produce a harsh result. This is because it’s lighting your subject directly from the camera. A separate add-on Speedlite flash, like the Speedlite EL-10, can be angled to bounce flash off the ceiling or a wall – creating a greater spread of light making it more flattering for the subject as well as giving you control over the direction the light comes from. Portrait photography with flash can especially benefit from this technique.

The bursts of light from your camera flash are so fast that they can be used to freeze motion. Set your camera to a shooting mode other than Av (which is best used for fill-in flash) and fire away. You’ll see the best results in low-light scenes.

A simple flash of light from a Canon Speedlite can open up a whole world of innovative action photography techniques. You can choose to freeze the action, shoot for motion blur, or capture both in a single frame.

The range of your camera built-in flash is limited to about 3m, but an add-on external flash, such as the Speedlite EL-10 or Speedlite EL-5, greatly extends this.

While R System cameras, like EOS R100, EOS R10 and EOS R50, have a built-in flash reach of 6m, the light from external flashes, like Speedlite EL-10, can reach a subject as far away as 40m - or even 60m in case of Speedlite EL-5.

What these Canon flash techniques show is that flash is not just for lighting up darkness, but compensating for all kinds of light conditions. Whether you have a built-in camera flash or choose to invest in an external flash, keep experimenting with how it could improve your photography.