Did you ever wonder why the pictures you take with your camera's external flash don't look good?  It's something every photographer goes through until they learn the secret.  Actually it's not really a secret at all just a simple technique.

Let's look at the different ways to use your external flash.  The first and most logical way is to point the flash right at your subject and fire away.  If you do that you'll end up with a picture that looks something like this.



Notice the lack of any shadow in the face.  This makes the picture look flat.  To have depth and dimension in your photographs you must have some shadow.






All right, you say,  everyone knows that you should bounce your flash off something like a white ceiling or wall.  This will help diffuse the light and make it look softer.  If you did that you would end up with a picture that looked something like this.










Not a huge difference but it is softer and definitely a step in the right direction.  So you might ask, what if we used a diffuser on the flash and bounced it off the ceiling.  It sounds like a great idea.  You would expect to get a broad diffuse light that would be flattering to any subject.  Well if you tried that you would end up with a picture that looked something like this.




I don't know about you but I'm not overly impressed.  Yes, it's much better than blasting the flash straight ahead but it is still a fairly flat picture.  If you had to use your flash on camera as your main light source this may be the best you can hope for. 

There is however a better way.  Take the flash off your camera!  You want the flash to strike your subject at an angle.  Generally 45 degrees to the camera and slightly higher than the subject is all you need.  This can be done a number of ways.  The simplest is to attach a cord to your camera and flash, there are different types of cords for different flash/ camera combinations.  In this case I attached a ETTL cord to my Canon 50D and 430 EXII Speedlight.  This allowed the camera to fully control the ETTL features of the flash rather than just triggering the flash.  The flash can also be triggered remotely with various optical and radio triggering devices.

For this last picture I attached the flash to a monopod and held it in my right hand and triggered the camera with a cable release held in my left hand.  Not the best way to take a picture but for this example it will work.

Notice that we now have highlights and shadows in the face of the subject.  In fact we have a nice pattern of highlight, shadow, highlight.  If you look you can also see that this photograph gives the appearance of depth around the eye and cheek closest to the camera.  Compared to the first photo this is a dramatic improvement.  It's also much better than the pictures where the flash was simply bounced off the ceiling.


Overall it's still not a great photograph but that's about as good as I could expect considering the method used to take it.  For your attempts I would recommend using a better looking subject than me, your pictures will be better from the start.