Since Canon PowerShot A95 doesn’t the capacity to install an extra external flash, is there a flashing system or similar that could help when taking photos at night? I have no problem with shots that are close, but shots that are about 10 or 20 steps away, it does need that extra umphh in flash.
You can use an optically-triggered slave flash unit (a photosensor detects your camera’s flash and triggers the slaved unit). This obviously means you should turn off the pre-flash (red-eye reduction) features; but these won’t be so important if you have the slaves positioned off the lens axis anyway. It’s also a problem if there are lots of people around shooting flash pictures.
This page has some useful notes on different slave setups.
No, you’re not going to be able to slave anything off your A95 because that camera (like many, if not all Canons) uses a preflash to evaluate the scene before firing the flash. Note: This is seperate from the Red-Eye Reduction feature. The preflash will fire even if you are not set to red-eye reduction.) The preflash will set off the slave before the shutter fires on the camera.
What you’re going to want to do is utilize the ‘night mode’, or whatever it’s called on that model. This will expose the scene with the flash, but with a slower shutter speed to allow more ambient light into the picture.
You could also try going into the manual mode; find an approximate shutter speed/apeture combination with the flash based on the exposure you get in night mode, then perhaps try boosting the ISO.
Not strictly true. There are external strobes that can ignore the pre-flash. They can be set to either “immediately slave” (optically) or “wait for the 2nd flash”. Unfortunately I only know of an underwater model (Sea and Sea YS-90DX, and there are other Sea and Sea models that have this feature) and it is very expensive (far more than the camera cost).
So the good news is that such an external strobe exists. The bad news has to do with using a flash that the camera doesn’t know about. Believe me, figuring out how best to utilize an external flash for underwater photography has been a huge challenge.
The problem is that because the external strobe will ignore the pre-flash, the camera will only have its pre-flash to try to determine the best settings. Then, when you take the actual shot, you will be supplementing the existing light with 1. your camera’s flash and 2. this external strobe. Bottomline - your camera’s (automatic) settings based on the pre-flash will always be off - expecting far less light than will be present when you take the shot. You will likely end up with lots of over-exposed shots.
Most cameras can handle a pretty decent range of light before being too overexposed. So there are tricks you can play with diffusing the light from the external strobe. And you can start using your camera in a more manual mode to adjust. But this takes more time, and may not be practical.
Canon makes an external flash for the PowerShot series. It’s actually a slave flash that triggers off the camera’s built-in flash, but presumably it ignores the preflash (as cormac262’s explanained).
Upon further googling, it turns out there are some third-party slave flashes that claim to work “with most digital cameras”. B&H lists a few here. Some specifically say they can be set to ignore preflash.