As I've mentioned earlier, I have an external flash but I haven't really used it yet.
The main reason is that I don't have a diffuser, and I don't like hard light when it's coming from a flash that is mounted directly on the camera. You can point the flash to the ceiling, but still, I don't like that effect too much either.
So until I get a diffuser someday, I won't be using the flash that way.
So I tried something else: I have a 2$ slave-unit I got from someone. The slave-unit responds optically to the built-in flash and triggers the external flash which is mounted on it. Since the slave-unit is a very small and light cube, it's no hassle at all to hold the external flash in one hand while taking a picture with the other hand. This works very well, albeit only with manual lenses on the K10D. When a automatic lens is mounted, the in-camera light metering (TTL I believe ?) kicks in and the built in flash fires twice (almost unnoticeably fast, not like the focusing aid or the red-eye flash), which causes the slave-unit to trigger too early.
Of course, this is a major drawback since it's hard to manually focus when you have a flash in one hand and a camera in the other... But I still managed to take this picture of myself (holding the external flash in my right hand) :
I definitely like this picture, but the drawback of not being able to focus keeps me from experimenting more with this. But I already have a very cheap solution in mind to solve this problem (more on this later).
Until then, I'm still using the built in flash.
I know that good photographers would never even consider of using that thing, and if you use it without "modifications", I must agree with them. The light is too direct, too harsh, and taking pictures of anything reflective is a nightmare.
But then I found a very simple way to get rid of the worst side-effects.
I was drinking some beers with my friends, and started taking pictures of them through my beer (a Duvel), kind of like a yellow colour filter.
But of course, the images where too deformed to be of any use (although they were funny :-).
So I tilted my camera vertically, and held the beer almost against the side of my lens so that it was only in front of the flash. This gave me the effect I was looking for. The harsh light is diffused by the glass and the beer, and is transformed into a beautiful golden-like colour.
Afterwards I started experimenting a lot with various beers :-), but the favorites remain Duvel and Vedett (both from the
Moortgat brewery).
Duvel in a glass results in yellowish-gold.
Duvel in a bottle (brown glass) diffuses the light even more and gives different effects depending on how much of the bottom of the bottle (more brown glass, less beer, so a darker effect) you get in front of your flash.
Vedett comes in a green bottle, so you get green pictures with this.
Experimenting with this (only covering a part of the flash, holding the bottle closer/further from the flash,...) results in some great pictures in environments that were too dark to go without flash (even with my 1.4 lens).
This trick comes in very handy when you are at a party and only want to take your camera with you without a bag of accessoires. Also, you have an excuse for constantly having a beer in your hands but I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing :-)
Here some examples:
Below another example of a Vedett picture, but I changed the whitebalance on my camera to get blue instead of green, and held the bottle only on the right side of the flash (maybe a little too much to the right :-).
In conclusion: it's definitely not easy to predict what you're gonna get with this method, but it sure is a nice solution for when you have no other option than to use the built-in flash. And it can give you some very nice and original pics.
