Camera Labs

Dear Gordon

I need your valuable advise on this


I have canon A620 and the pictures taken in day light are great. because of low ISO the pictures taken at night are not very good. I tried taking a few out in open during temple festival . there will be only a few halogen lamps available for lighting.

Those taken with flash very near to the subject are very good. I find there is lot of noise in the area were the flash does not reach, even in the near background. for example an image of an elephant practicaly blends into the dark background.

It is very difficult to use a tripod (for slow shutter speeds- some thing like 2 seconds and f2.8 iso 50/100 with on board flash ) under the cuircumstances.


do you think an additional sensor flash will solve the problem somewhat?. There is no hotshoe or direct connection point for the additional flash. so I have to use sensor flash.



thank you
regards
suresh

Hello Suresh, as you've found, a flash is only effective over a certain distance, and for built-in models that can be limited. Increasing the ISO will increase the effective range of the flash, but with worse noise levels as a result.

A larger, more powerful external flash will also extend the range while allowing you to maintain a lower ISO. This sounds like the best option for you, although I'm afraid I don't know what external flash options there are for the A620. I would guess you'd be limited to a model mounted on a bracket which screws ito the A620's tripod thread.

As you suggest, this could be triggered by the A620's built-in flash, although I don't know how well this would work in practice, especially in terms of metering. You would probably need to use the A620 in manual and experiment with different exposure settings for the external flash for different subject distances.

In the meantime, have you tried increasing the flash exposure compensation to the maximum of +2EV? This should increase the power of the flash and improve the situation a little.

Best of luck, and if anyone's got any better suggestions, please feel free to jump in!

Gordon