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3. Less redeye Because hot-shoe flashes are raised high above the lens axis, they eliminate (or greatly reduce) the possibility of redeye in people pictures.
4. More lens choices Built-in flashes and large lenses don’t mix well. The popular 24–200mm and 35– 300mm superzooms, for example, are typically so large in length and girth that they block the output of built-in flash units, creating a dark semicircle at the bottom of every horizontal and on the side of every vertical picture, often regardless of subject distance or focal length. Because a hot-shoe flash usually sits high above the lens, your optical options grow exponentially.

5. Accessories A small industry is dedicated to producing accessories for shoe-mount flashes. Diffusers soften output for more attractive lighting; spreaders expand a hot-shoe’s output to eliminate or reduce light falloff; bounce cards provide fill for shadows and spectral highlights for the eyes in bounce-lit portraits; and colored filters offer the possibility of balancing light sources of mismatched color temperatures.

6. Increased exposure options Shoe-mount flashes offer exposure options built-ins can’t (or can, but usually don’t): High-speed syncing, second curtain syncing, and manual output, for example. The most important of these expanded options is the ability to move the flash off the camera­—either with an accessory TTL cable or even in a non-TTL manual mode—to light a background or a subject from behind or from the side. Try that with a built-in flash!

In fact, your hot-shoe flash doesn’t even have to be TTL-dedicated (that is, controlled by through-the-lens metering). With today’s digital SLRs, the exposure hassles that once complicated non-TTL flash operation are greatly minimized. Your DLSR’s monitor tells you instantly if you need more or less light. And what the LCD image doesn’t tell you about exposure, a histogram usually will.
The moral? If you’ve been sitting on the fence about adding a hot-shoe flash, jump.

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