Hot Foot Flash Definitely Improved My Pics!

[Hammer]

About 5 years ago I purchased a Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ50 to take pictures of (among other things as well) my Busse knife collection.  I found that if I set the camera on automatic and took outdoor pictures, they were great.  The down side is that when I tried to take pictures of my knives with the flash on the camera in indoor lighting, the pics were terrible.  I even went so far as to purchase one of those little tents that came with about 4 different canvases, and a couple of special lights.  Still no improvement.
About a month ago, I saw a guy taking pictures with a hot foot flash and a camera similar to mine.  I figured that if it worked for him, it certainly couldn't hurt me, so I got on eBay and found one that said it was compatible with my camera. 
After some experimentation, I found that depending where your subject was in relation to the room, you could get very good pictures by pointing the hot foot flash properly.  I found that for most indoor pictures of inanimate objects, pointing the flash at about 45deg upward and a little to the left or right, I could take some pretty good pictures.
For instance:

With hot foot flash...


No hot foot flash...

[dks]

An external flash is always a great investment; offers more than just buying an expensive lens. Try to bounce the light off the ceiling for even better results. (removes strong shadows)

Looking at your 2nd picture what the problem seems to be is that (irrespective of which flash you used), because you are using a white background (bed sheet?) the camera's metering system combines and averages the brightness of the sheet with the dark colour of the knives handles. The camera is not actually aware of the colour of your background and just wants to have a balance between the dark and light parts of the picture (uniform result). Since the brightness "wins" the camera makes the whole picture darker so that the white background does not get "burned" (most normal situations require an equal amount of bright and dark colours). Thus the background appears grey, instead of white.

What you need to do, irrespective of the flash used, is to adjust the EV (Exposure Value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value) setting of your camera to +0.5 or +1, letting the camera know that you actually do want the picture to be brighter than average. That should restore the details in the knives and produce a more pleasant picture.


  Also, you can allways make adjustement to a lees than optimal picture afterwars, as shown below with your picture after 30 seconds with Picasa (free software)

[Hammer]

An external flash is always a great investment; offers more than just buying an expensive lens. Try to bounce the light off the ceiling for even better results. (removes strong shadows)

Looking at your 2nd picture what the problem seems to be is that (irrespective of which flash you used), because you are using a white background (bed sheet?) the camera's metering system combines and averages the brightness of the sheet with the dark colour of the knives handles. The camera is not actually aware of the colour of your background and just wants to have a balance between the dark and light parts of the picture (uniform result). Since the brightness "wins" the camera makes the whole picture darker so that the white background does not get "burned" (most normal situations require an equal amount of bright and dark colours). Thus the background appears grey, instead of white.

What you need to do, irrespective of the flash used, is to adjust the EV (Exposure Value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value) setting of your camera to +0.5 or +1, letting the camera know that you actually do want the picture to be brighter than average. That should restore the details in the knives and produce a more pleasant picture.


  Also, you can allways make adjustement to a lees than optimal picture afterwars, as shown below with your picture after 30 seconds with Picasa (free software)

Good info!  Thanks dks.  The next step for me is to pull out the direction booklet that came with my camera and become more knowledgible about setting the stops and the aperture and iso and so on...