Rear Sync - Flash

There's a setting on you camera that will help you get better-quality photos using flash. It's called Rear Sync, and what it basically does is change the time when the flash actually fires. Usually flash fires the moment you press the shutter button, so it does freeze any action in the scene, but it also generally makes everything solid black behind your subject (like you see in most snapshots). Changing to Rear Sync makes the flash fire at the end of the exposure (rather than the beginning), which lets the camera expose for the natural background light in the room first, and then at the very last second, it fires the flash to freeze your subject. Now your background isn't black - instead, it has color, depth, and detail, and this gives you a much more professional look all the way around. In the example below, the shot on the left is using the normal default flash setting (notice how dark the background is). For the shot on right, I switched the flash to Rear sync.

Give it a try and you'll see what I mean (just remember to keep the camera still when shooting in Rear Sync mode, because the shutter stays open longer- enough to expose for the background.)

This setting is very useful, while shooting in an aquarium where you want to capture the subject along with low light activities in background.