switch off the flash on your digital camera...

... and enjoy much better photographs!i've lost count of the number of times i've been out at a club or pub or other indoor event and seen people taking photographs - these days usually with a digital camera - and almost always with the camera's flash on. and i'd bet my bottom dollar [or should that be euro?] that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the resulting photographs are awful. and why is this?well, for a start, your subjects, who seconds previously were looking so sexy and seductive in the subdued lighting of your surroundings, that you felt the urge to reach for the camera in the first place, now have all the femme fatalistic charms of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming juggenaut - yes, there's nothing quite like a blinding light full in the face to turn even the otherwise most photogenic of persons into a white-skinned zombie with glowing red eyes and the startled expression of someone who's just had an ice-cube unexpectedly inserted into their underwear.and for seconds, what the glare of the flash does for your subjects, it also does for their surroundings. the sight of your true-love's silken skin glowing in the soft light of the candle on your table, as the far off neon light throws firey blue and red sparks from their eyes, may well inspire a wish to preserve that special moment for ever. but by the time you've drenched the scene in several hundred watts of camera flash, your intimate ambient surroundings will have all the romance of a motorway service station burger bar.in the old clockwork days of film photography, taking acceptable photographs in low-light conditions required expensive wide-aperture lenses, fast film speeds and complicated darkroom calculations to produce decent prints [i know - i was there!] but modern digital cameras are so much more light sensitive than film cameras that you don't need any special equipment and you certainly don't need a flash to take acceptable and occasionally even great photographs, in the kind of low light conditions that would have been nigh on impossible with a film camera. setting your digital camera up for low-light photography involves changing a couple of settings, but it's nothing too onerous. first of all, take your camera off "automatic" mode and set it to "manual". this will allow you to adjust the individual settings needed for low-light photography.turn off the flash. most cameras have a button which allows you to set the flash in different modes - automatic, red-eye reduction [yeah. right! -like that works!], always on or always off. if yours does then select "always off" for the flashadjust your "film speed" [obviously this is a misnomer as digital cameras don't have film. the terms dates back to the days of film cameras, when different speeds of films were rated by how sensitive to light they were - the higher the film speed, the better for low light photography]. finding the film speed or ASA setting on your particular camera may take some searching - and it's beyond the scope of a general guide like this to include camera specific instructions - but this setting will be a number usually followed by "ASA" or "ISO" [eg. 100ASA, 400ASA etc]. your camera may well have this set to "auto" by default. if you can find a film speed or ASA setting, set it to the highest available. this will have a slightly detrimental effect on the image quality [it will be 'grainier' at higher film speeds] but it will greatly increase your camera's ability to cope with low light situations.