Fill Flash?

[babos02]

can anyone help explain to me what fill flash is?

is it just a level of flash that fills in the photo? haha?

still pretty new to photography and some one told me some fill flash would help.

thanks

[Tommy]

fill flash is flash used to brighten up (fill in) the shadows in a photo. Like when you take a photo of someone outside in the sun, and their hat casts a shadow on their face, you could use a little bit of fill flash to bright that spot up. The sun is your main light, and the flash is your "fill"... hope this helps... I'm bad a explaining stuff some times... lol...

[babos02]

so i would just use my pop up flash on my xti? or would it be more beneficial to buy a flash to attach on top?

[Tommy]

You can use your pop up flash for fill. An external flash is definitely more beneficial, but if you're just a beginner, the pop up flash will do just fine until you actually hit it's limitations. ;)

[egordon99]

Quick and dirty outdoor fill flash tutorial -

Basically, if your subject is in shade and the background is bright (ie under a tree) or majorly backlit, fill flash is your friend. Think of those times when you got a properly exposed background, but the subject was almost pitch black.

Put camera into Av mode, metering will set the shutter speed to expose the overall shot (which in the situations that call for fill-flash will generally be the background) based on your selected aperture/ISO.

Make sure flash is set to HSS (in case your shutter speed go faster than 1/250s) and E-TTL. Fire away! The shutter speed/f-stop/ISO will expose the background, and the flash should output enough power to light up the foreground.

Now to control the background exposure, you use exposure compensation on the camera body (which would adjust the shutter speed), to adjust how much fill for the flash exposure, you use Flash exposure compensation. The trick is balancing the two (as it is with indoor work), and that comes with experience/experimentation.