First, let's discuss turning night to day. Ill limit my examples to those conditions were you still have enough light to get an okay exposure. In other words, you arent depending 100% on your flash for you light. The conditions at least have to be good enough for you to use ambient light for something on the image. As an example, The Cold Lake image on previous page was planned completely without flash as a tool. Just as I was taking the picture it occurred to me that I could brighten the foreground rocks a bit by using my flash. Without really knowing what to do but having a vision of what I wanted, I simply set the flash on "Matrix Balance Fill" without any exposure compensation and let her rip. It worked out. The foreground water is frozen with some of the rocks exhibiting a sparkle. Its very nice.

Now, if youre trying to portray motion, flash can be a valuable tool. Unfortunately, motion is a difficult "experience" to simulate in our medium. If you select a shutter speed thats too fast, the subject appears to be frozen in time like it was a model in a museum or painting on a wall. While this accurately depicts the subjects action, it doesnt exhibit the speed or aggressiveness that the subjector photographeris experiencing. If you pick a shutter speed thats too slow, you get a smuge streaking across your image. Obviously, this is not what you want. Something else can be done. We can use a slower shutter speed to blur the subject like it was some kind of super hero running at blinding speeds. You remember those comic books of the superhero Flash? He was incredibly fast but unfortunately for the artist, difficult to portray. How did the artist do it? All he did was draw a blur with the basic colors of our hero streaking into the scene with a sharp version of him ending the blur. It's a very inventive technique and it's something we can adopt for photography. By using technology available on todays flash units, we can simulate in real life what those comic book artists struggled over. The Sandhill Crane above was made with the goal to create this speed effect. That meant having a bluring motion culminated by the frozen subject. To do this with our cameras you have to set it to fire the flash just prior to the shutter closing. This causes the background to blur with the extended shutter speed then the subject gets frozen by the flash at the end. Essentially, the blur leads up to the subject just like in those comic books.

For our next example, lets pretend youre shooting in extremely drab conditions. The sky is highly overcast but it doesn't have that "softbox" characteristic that evenly illuminates your subjects and removes those unsightly harsh shadows. Its the kind of light that just makes everything look flat and unattractive. What are you going to do? Bring out your flash I say. Use it to illuminate the subject but not so much that it sticks out like a sore thumb. Set your flash so it supplements the ambient conditions. Honestly, it's a lot easier than it sounds. With a little bit of experience with your equipment you'll figure out excatly how much compensation to dial into your flash. In my case, I like to use my flash's Matrix Balance Fill mode and apply between -2.0 and -1.3ev compensation. I learned this totally through experience and reviewing hundreds of images. This type of flash photography is a lot like what you do when you "fill flash". Instead of filling in the shadows, youre using your flash to make the subject "pop" against its background. But, like I said before you dont want too much of a good thing. You dont want it to look like youve got a search light pointed at your subject. In this image of the Great Egret in-flight, the light was very flat--just like the conditions I described earlier. In this case, I used the flash to illuminate the Egret without making it look unnatural against the brown background. If I hadnt used the flash, the bird wouldve looked a lot more like the background and the it wouldn't have been so distinctive.