using flash indoors

Depends on what your trying to do with it.
From the looks of your images they are close to slightly under ambient light and the flash is doing more than just fill. It is adding enough light to gain proper exposure.

So what are your issues exactly?
What part of the flash do you not like??

What was or is the look problem you do not like?

I don't like flash for the most part. Out doors using it as a fill I have had some success and seen it done well, but indoor I do not like it at all. But that is just my opinion and my taste. I have seen a few that I liked that looked ok.

The problems I have with it. Often the background is underexposed and dark. Often the subject looks like paparatzi (sp?) It makes the smoke and haze stand out more, too much contrast. I don't like the mixture of the stadium light color and the flash color.

2 and 6 do not look like obvious on camera flash but are also on the dark side. I guess I just don't care for the flash look so much but it may be because I do not know how to do it well and have not seen very many people make it work and look good. I have seen some of the special effect using a flash and getting blur but it is more for effect..

You aren't going to get many shots indoors without it. I'll use flash when needed, always.

These are with flash and I do not see any of the problems you've listed.

Ok lets do it like this...

Here is a basic lesson in Photography...

Lets call it Photography Moto 1...

Your in the stadium and you set up your gear..
You start at ISO 400 and you want to shoot at F4..
At F4 the camera says it wants to shoot at 1/30th.. We know this to slow to work. So if you crank up the ISO to 800 this will give you 1 more stop of light.

This will only give you a shutter speed of 1/60th now which is still to slow.
So what now are your options?

You can keep cranking the ISO, shoot slow pans with fill flash, change our aperture or use your flash to create enough light to shoot at a higher shutter speed..
Thats all you can do.

In these cases we are dealing with ambient light. Ambient is the lighting in the room. A correct ambient exposure will give you proper lighting in the room.

As we are in our dilemma we know that ambient is at 1/60th at our F4 aperture.
So we decide to go with 1/250th at F4. This will be 2 full stops above ambient so the stadium will be darker than it should be and everything our flash can light up should be exposed properly.
The faster your shutter speed is the harder your flash will have to work and the darker the stadium will become.

Everyone understand that?

If you look at the original post you will notice that the exposures are close to ambient light.
This now opens up another problem.
Anytime ambient is visible in the image and your flash actually fills the rider up you will have a color balance issue.
The ambient in stadiums are either Tungsten or most likely fluorescent.
Both light sources have a different color temperature than your flash does.

Your flash will out put at close to the natural daylight temperature of 5600 K.
Where as Fluorescent lights usually range from 2700K to 3500K. While some of the newer and more expensive fluorescents can be anywhere from 4100K to 6500K.
Tungsten usually are around 3200K.

No matter.. When you mix 2 light sources you will have the strange color shifts.

The 2 ways to combat this in the stadium is to either.
A) Use a gel on your flash to change its color temperature to the same as the lights in the stadium or --
Shoot at ambient light and just use the flash as a filler.

If the flash only slightly fills in the shadows while the bike and rider are already properly exposed from shooting ambient then you will not see the color differences.
Look at Jbo's photos. These were shot at ambient and the flash did not have to fill much in..
In them you see no weird color shifts nor do you see any smoke or a dark stadium.


Hope this helped you guys understand why you get the weird colors and why using flash make the background look dark.

These were all taken without flash.http://www.mxphotos.net/album/thumbnails.php?album=11

When you are up in the stands using a 400mm lens, unless you use a magafier lens on the flash you are not much flash but I will have to test that. I have not been down on the floor on an AMA supercross so I don't know how much smoke and haze you get. Your pictures were taken in practice it looks like when there is not much going on.

As to the color issues, they happen with flash, like the previous poster stated, mixing different color lights it is going to happen. I have never tried the gel on the front of a flash, That would be interesting but not going to happen at 400mm. In your images, I see almost no fill flash reflections off the bottom of the motorcycle case/frame so if your fill flash is that low I would not expect any color issues.

The more light that is used in the image, the more haze/smoke and color issues you will see.

I will have to try some of the suggestions. I may even bring my better beamer to see how that works out, the only bummer is more to carry

I get tired of this site not letting me edit my posts and starting a new empty one.