Flashy Photographs – Could Your Dog Photographs Benefit From a Pop of Flash?
Photography Quick Tip: Use fill-flash for your (dog) portraits

Let me start off by saying that the photos I take of my dog do. In almost all situations, I find I am better off using a smidge of flash. (There. That’s an awfully scientific use for the power setting I use).

Why do I say that? Well, Rusty is my superhero buddy, and like any decent superhero, he wears a mask, a non-removable one at that. Still… no cape though. He watched “The Incredibles”, barked it out with Etna, and the result… no capes:

Because he has so much black around his eyes, and because his eyes themselves are dark brown I often tend to lose them in photos. With just a little pop of flash I can bring them right back.

Give it a try yourself and see if it could work for you. I reckon that you will appreciate this trick, especially if you have a black dog.

Now I am not saying, go all out shhhbanggggg hard flash on your pictures, but do use “fill flash”. Check your camera’s manual to see how to use your pop-up flash to do this. Your pop-up flash has its limitations because it’s tiny and not extremely powerful, but you don’t need extremely powerful for the purpose of “seeing behind the mask”. Like I said, you just need that “smidge” of extra light. That is not to say, that if you have an add-on flash, that you should forsake that one in favor of the pop-up flash. That is NOT what I am saying, but your pop-up flash will work just fine, as will the built-in flash of your compact point-and-shoot camera (if you still even own one, what with the capabilities of smartphone cameras nowadays).

What you’re doing by using the flash that way is the same thing you would be doing if you were taking a portrait of a person in harsh light and you wanted to get rid of some of the harsh and ugly shadows in their face, caused by the overhead sun. I won’t bore you with the details, bút if you must know them, there’s always Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fill_flash and about a bazillion tutorials on the matter. (Let me just make sure you understand that I myself am the queen of “must-know”, and that I fully support anyone ending up down the fill-flash-rabbit-hole).

“Well, Kajsa,” I hear you say (is it a bad sign if you’re hearing voices?), “aren’t you supposed to shoot at sunrise or sundown? Isn’t that what the pros do?”
“Yeah… well…”, is my response, “when you go on holidays, do you always get to choose the time for being in a certain spot right when your permanently masked or unmasked but definitely non-caped crusader is doing something cute? Or when you’re passing by that epic view you want to pose in front of? Oh, and by the way, does that epic view happen to be facing the wrong way, light-wise?”
I reckon that given, or rather despite, those circumstances you would still like to try and capture the best shot possible.

That’s when fill flash comes in handy.

Case in point, these two photographs taken at what was almost the brightest time of day, during a summer walk in the Austrian Alps.

The first one, which is one of my all-time favorite photos of Rusty as it combines him and the Tyrolian Alps with the memory of hiking with my sons, was taken with on-camera fill-flash. When I took the second picture, the flash had overheated (Ohhh Nikon SB-900, I value your many positive features, but you run way too hawwwwt) and ended up not firing.
Both images received basic corrections in Lightroom (exposure, shadows, and highlights) to draw out the best in them.

Can you tell the difference?