I started with a fluorescent lamp that was supposed to be “daylight spectrum”, and could be put very close to the subject. It worked better than nothing, but the colors seemed a bit washed out and it could have been brighter. I then put the whole camera/light assembly into a cardboard box lined with aluminum foil. This captured a lot of the light from the lamp, reflecting it back so it had another chance to illuminate the subject.

(ignore the black furry thing sticking out from behind the box, that’s just a cat). It looks kind of dim in this picture because the sunlight from the window was washing it out, but it was actually pretty bright. This helped a lot, it filled in most of the shadows and gave more uniform illumination. It also allowed me to point in things like desk lamps, to add additional light from a different direction. In the picture, the desk lamp has an incandescent bulb, but this dumped in way too much heat (which the light box retained very effectively). I later replaced it with a small compact-fluorescent bulb, which ran much cooler. I had thought about orienting the box to catch sunlight, but this would have put me in the awkward position of depending on the sun to be the same today as it was yesterday, and would probably also turn the little box into a solar oven. This would probably not be a good plan.

After using this setup for a while, its deficiencies became apparent. Chief among them being that even with the desk lamps, I was still needing shutter speeds around 1/30 second, which is kind of slow. Any motion of the subject at all caused a lot of blurring at that shutter speed. The normal solution to this problem is to use a flash. “So, what’s wrong with the on-camera flash?” I hear you cry. Well, the macro lens I used on the camera blocked the on-camera flash, and so it just wasted my battery without illuminating the subject. This problem was curable if I could just have a flash that could be put wherever I wanted, instead of being permanently embedded on the camera.

So, I’d been griping to a friend (who is a very proficient photographer – Hi, Kevin!) about how I really needed some sort of off-camera flash that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, and that could be triggered even though my point-and-shoot camera didn’t actually have any way to connect to a separate flash unit. He then told me that studio photographers sometimes use “studio slave flashes”: they are about the size of a compact-fluorescent light bulb, and screw into a standard light fixture. So, meet my robot slave – I got it from Adorama Camera for about $20:

The best part is that it has a sensor that detects when the on-camera flash fires, and so, with the speed of light being what it is, the slave flash goes off at the very moment when the camera is still taking the picture. Of course, that’s in theory. In practice, a lot of modern cameras normally default to firing the on-camera flash twice, and take the picture on the second flash. The first flash firing is used to check the light levels, and the camera can then automatically set the exposure to actually take the picture when it flashes again. Also, some red-eye reduction uses multiple flashes to contract the pupils of people’s eyes before the picture is taken. Both of these are actually pretty nice features, provided you aren’t trying to use a slave flash with your camera. Unfortunately, when they do the pre-firing of the flash, the slave flash triggers the *first* time the on-camera flash goes off. It then has no juice left a fraction of a second later to fire the *second* time, and the slave flash might as well not even be there in that case. Luckily, though, the Canon A95 did have a full-manual mode where the flash only fires once, and so in manual mode, the robot slave worked fine.

There is an easy way to tell if your camera flash is set correctly to run the slave flash: just take a picture of the slave flash unit and see what the picture looks like. If it is synchronizing correctly, it will look something like this:

Ach! Mine eyes! I am momentarily blinded!

There is one sort-of problem, though: this flash was actually way, way overpowered for what I was doing. It’s intended for lighting up a person in a photographer’s studio from about ten feet away, and I had it in a light fixture about two feet from the camera. If it is pointed directly at the subject, then even with the camera’s fastest exposure setting everything still comes out completely white. But, by pointing it up and bouncing the light off the (white) ceiling, it came out just about right at 1/500th of a second exposure (and bouncing the light made it diffuse enough that there were no harsh shadows).

I think the light quality using the flash was noticeably better, what with more uniform lighting. It also let me hand-hold the camera sometimes rather than always using a rigid stand, because now the shutter speed was fast enough that the shaking of my hands didn’t blur the picture. This was a big deal, because now I could take pictures from the side (or other angles) rather than being restricted to shooting straight down. Another big bonus of this was when I photographed the little buggers that insisted on scurrying or wiggling all the time. With the light fixtures I used to use, I generally couldn’t get much faster than a 1/30th second exposure, which meant the moving bugs were almost always blurry. The order-of-magnitude-faster shutter speed with the slave flash certainly took care of *that* problem!

And, since the slave flash screwed into a light fixture that plugged into the wall, I didn’t have to worry about batteries for it. The cycle time was pretty quick, it could easily keep up with my camera no matter how fast I took pictures. And, it made a satisfying “PAF!” sound every time it fired, which for some reason I find very amusing.