Join me as I take one photo a week for the next year, each one capturing a specific aspect of our family life and my kid's childhood that I want remembered. You can read the introduction post here, an FAQ post here and all related posts here.

Happy Halloween!

Since October has five Mondays, this week is a bonus week. If you've missed a week or two, now is a great time to catch up. Even if you haven't been playing along so far, this week is for everyone.

Assignment 18: Turn off your flash.

Turning off your flash isn't going to be possible at all times, but I encourage you to pull out your camera manual, dust it off, and figure out how.

Flash can be a great thing - it gives you light when the camera thinks there's not enough. The only problem with that? It floods a whole bunch of light straight on to your subject and takes away the shadows. And the shadows? They're what make a photograph pretty.


These two photos were taken in the same spot, in the same light, with my point and shoot camera on the automatic setting, one minute apart. The only difference is that the flash was turned on for the photograph on the left and turned off for the photograph on the right.

Without getting into a whole lot of theory, when you turn off your flash one thing your camera will do is lower your shutter speed. When your shutter speed is low, any motion from you or your subject is going to make your photograph a bit blurry. My dad is great at taking a photograph with a low shutter speed, he's really steady. Me? Not so much. To combat shaky hands when you're snapping the shutter, brace your body against a wall or rest your camera on a solid surface. That will prevent some of the natural shake that happens when you press the shutter release.

You can also see the non-flash photograph is much more evenly lit. Your flash puts lots of light onto the area immediately in front of the camera but that light falls off very quickly making your subject look nicely exposed but the background look very dark.


She has a cuter look on her face in the photo on the left but again, you can see what a difference turning off the flash makes to the overall "prettiness" of the photograph.

If it's really dark you're probably not going to have the option to turn off your flash but I encourage you to give it a try in some lower light situations in the next week.

On a side note, if you are interested in the theory and understanding how your camera (and ultimately you) use ISO, aperture and shutter speed to determine the exposure, Understanding Exposure is a great book to get you started. Or feel free to comment below or send me and email and I can put together an FAQ post with the answers to some of your questions.

Have a fun and safe night trick-or-treating!