WHY DO THE PICTURES COME OUT DARK ON MY NIKON D70S?

The flash fires up but the pictures come out dark in interiors on my Nikon D70S. Why is that happening?

Basically speaking that on camera flash is useless in that it's power is very small. If you are talking interiors during the day, you are better off not using the flash. However when you encounter "dark" results you need to increase the ISO value. I found an ISO of around 400 works good for my house during the day. But night is another matter. It all depends on the amount of lamp light you have. You may have to increase your ISO even higher than 400. But remember the higher the ISO the more "noise" is introduced and pictures are better and clearer with as low an ISO as you can get away with. During the night is another matter. So as I said previously you may have to increase the ISO value until you get acceptable results.

A hint; here in the Northwest I use those low wattage bulbs, with daylight color temperature. I use as high a wattage as I and my electric bill can be comfortable. But the most important part is I always buy the bulbs rated for "daylight".

I just copy-pasted this, It was my answer in some other discussion. IT WAS MY ANSWER ORIGINALLY, and I'm too tired to type that all, so never mind…

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If you want well-lightend photos, I suggest you get a cheap, fast lens like Nikkor 50mm f1.8 lens which is in the market for round-about $120. (You can get better versions of similar lenses like 35mm f1.8 and 85mm f1.8)

If you can't afford any other lenses and want to keep on with the kit lens, here are my suggestions:

1. Play with the light-meter in your camera, Something like full + (Nikon) will be overexposed and something like complete - will be underexposed. However, I would say that try to keep it on zero, but don't hesitate in changing accordingly.

2. Play with aperture, Low f.stop will give you shallow depth of field but will let you get more light entered through the camera, while smaller aperture (yet larger f number) will give you deep depth of field but less light. In your case, try to keep the aperture as wide open as you can.

3. Play with the shutter speed, A long shutter speed, aka long exposure will give you more light in your pictures, but a fast shutter speed will give you less amount of light. It also depends upon what you capturing, If you're shooting portraits, something like 1/60 will be fine, if shooting action, try to keep it fast yet light friendly, though 1/250 second shutter speed is MUST for capturing action.

4. ISO, Play with it, Smaller ISO, Camera will be less sensitive to light and images will retain their high quality, I keep it quite low shooting outdoors. High ISO value, Camera more sensitive to light but the images will be noisy and grainy and would not be able to retain their good quality. High ISO is suitable when shooting indoors or in dim-light situations but my strong recommendation will be to keep it as low as possible. I never exceed the 800 mark.

5. Explore the white balance options in your camera.

Hope that helped, Search for photography cheat sheets on the internet, that may help.

Happy Shooting!

Check your "flash exposure compensation" setting. Your manual will show you how to set this up. Be sure it is set to zero. If it's set to a negative number, it will make the images darker.

Also check your exposure compensation setting (different from the flash exposure compensation).