Why do my flash photos look so bad?

People conclude they dislike flash when what they dislike is one specific arrangement of it: a small source, on the lens axis, firing at full strength into a dark room. Almost every complaint traces to those three properties, and all three can be changed.

Step by step

1. Diagnose the three separate faults.Hard-edged shadows come from a small source. Flat, shapeless faces come from light on the lens axis. A hard black shadow outlined on the wall behind comes from the subject being close to that wall with a frontal source. They have different fixes.
2. Make the source bigger by bouncing it.Tilt the flash head to fire at a white ceiling or a nearby wall. The whole ceiling becomes the light source, so it is enormous relative to the subject, and the shadows go soft. This is the single most important thing a flash with a tilting head can do.
3. Get the light off the lens axis.Bouncing sideways off a wall gives you directional light and shape. If you can take the flash off the camera entirely — a cable, an inexpensive radio trigger, or a second flash — you gain full control over direction, and that is what separates a lit photograph from a snapshot.
4. Watch what you bounce off.The light takes the colour of the surface. A magnolia ceiling gives warm light, a green wall gives green faces, a high ceiling gives too little light and a wooden one gives orange. White and near-white surfaces only.
5. Balance flash against the room.The classic flash photograph has a bright subject in a black room. The fix is to let the ambient light record too: slow the shutter, open the aperture, or raise the ISO so the room registers, and let the flash light the subject on top of that. The shutter speed controls the ambient exposure; the flash controls the subject.
6. Move the subject away from the wall.Even bounced, a subject with their back against a wall casts a visible shadow onto it. A metre forward removes it almost entirely and lets the background go darker, which looks far more considered.
7. Turn the flash power down.Flash exposure compensation, usually one or two stops down, turns a flash from the main light into a fill that lifts shadows without announcing itself. In daylight this is how you keep a blue sky and a lit face at the same time.
8. Use fill flash outdoors.The most useful thing an on-camera flash does. In harsh midday sun or against a bright sky, a modest amount of flash fills the eye sockets and the shadow under the chin. Nobody looking at the picture will identify it as flash.
9. Understand the phone's limits.A phone LED is a very small continuous light on the lens axis, and none of the fixes above apply to it. It exists for documents and for finding your keys. For a photograph, more ambient light beats it every time.

Tips

• Bouncing costs light. Expect to need two to three stops more power or ISO than firing direct, which is why bounce works in a room and not in a hall.
• A small white card behind a bounced flash head throws a little light forward and puts a catchlight in the eyes. Most flashes have one built in.
• Red eye is the flash reflecting off the retina straight back into a lens right beside it. Moving the flash away from the lens removes the cause entirely.

Common mistakes

• Firing direct flash into a room and calling it lit — The falloff is severe: the nearest person is overexposed, the person behind is correctly lit and the back of the room is black. Bouncing spreads it and evens it out.
• Using flash as the only light in a dark venue — The result is a subject floating in blackness with no sense of place. Let the ambient light record with a slower shutter and use the flash to lift the subject out of it.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask