Have you ever taken a picture with you camera using the in-built flash and found the image to be poorly illuminated and patchy? This is because the flash that comes with most cameras is not designed to deal with anything but the basics.

And the basics means “pretty basic” - perhaps, one or two people fairly close to the camera. Once you start getting groups of people or people on the other side of the room, then your camera flash won’t cope. It just isn’t powerful enough or sophisticated enough.

And I am sure that you have been to stadiums and concert halls and seen flashes from the crowd trying to take a picture of their idols on the field or on stage. In those cases,

On-camera flash (of the type that is in-built into the camera itself) is designed for simple situations – the subject, basically, needs to be relatively close.

For anything more tricky – such as groups of people several metres away, then you need an external flashgun that is more powerful and that can calculate the exposure in conjunction with the messages it sends and receives from the electronic attachment it has with the camera.

These, of course, cost more, but are designed specifically to cover the more advanced situations that photographers often find themselves in.

Eric Hartwell runs the photography resource site http://www.theshutter.co.uk and the associated discussion forums as well as the regular weblog at http://thephotographysite.blogspot.com

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