Sometimes when you look at the picture your camera took, all you get is white. I always thought it was because it was positioned too close to the subject or I had something obstructing its field of view.

But I recently had a use for it that proved this isn’t the case. The flash just seems to flash brighter sometimes.

My church had some kind of a critter loose in it. I volunteered to trap it in a humane trap and let it go, but first I wanted to know what it was, so I set up my D55.

I set it up at about 6:50 in the evening and retrieved it the following evening.

Here are all the pictures that were on it:

The three pictures in red were taken at 6:50 p.m. when I set it up and was walking away.
The next set in purple were between 10:06 p.m. and 10:09 p.m. when I went back to adjust something with the food (didn’t touch the camera).
The next set in blue were between 6:54 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. when the the critter came to eat.
The final set in green were 7:57 a.m. and later.

So notice the way some pictures are fine and some are totally washed out with the flash.

You can explain some of this. If the camera was too close to the area, it could be that the blue set was washed out because it was dark in the building and the flash went off. Then at 7:57 a.m. for the green set, it was light enough in the building so that the camera didn’t flash at all.

That makes total sense.

But what doesn’t make sense are these two cases:
1. For the first three pictures in red at 6:50 p.m., it DID flash. I saw it flash behind me as I walked away. Why were the other flash pictures washed out, but these three were not?
2. For the last three pictures in purple at 10:09 p.m., it also flashed.

The only thing that MAY have been different about these anomaly pictures is that MAYBE I had some house lights on. I’m pretty sure that for the first three sets of pictures because I turned off the lights in the main room but had the lights in the hallway on as I went up the stairs.

For the last three of the purple section, I may have turned on the lights in the room at that point, but hadn’t yet done so in the other pictures in the purple section.

Which leads me to the conclusion that the camera flashes brighter if there are absolutely no other lights on, but not as bright if there is dim lighting.

Interesting.

I have an email in to Moultrie about this. We’ll see what they say. Too bad there isn’t a brightness setting for the flash.

Oh, incidentally, it was no surprise what kind of critter it was: