Portraits that you take in close quarters can be ruined by the uneven lighting that comes from your flash, and really close-up photos--also known as --suffer from terrible overexposure and ugly shadows. There's a solution, though, a different sort of flash known as a ring flash. Before you shrug off this solution as too expensive or only for pros, let me point out that there are a lot of ways to get the benefits of a ring flash, and some of them are cheap or very nearly free.

So what is a ring flash? Simply put, it is a gadget that has multiple flash units that wrap around the lens instead of sitting atop your camera and generating a single source of light. They all fire together, generating a ring of light that illuminates your subject from every direction.

Serious photographers--and ones with deep pockets--sometimes purchase sophisticated ring flashes for their digital SLRs. Canon photographers, for example, might choose a $500 Macro Ring Lite for close-up photography. A ring like this is valuable for close-up work because ordinarily the lens would block the flash when you get really close to your subject. A ring flash, however, provides unimpeded illumination. For more creative applications, you can even control the relative power of each side of the ring.