The most important thing to not getting those flat deer in headlights type of pics with your point and shoot (PS) is to use off-camera lighting. I will not go into all the details as this is not a lighting class, you can find those online anywhere just do a search. I am going to talk about the setup I will be using and explain other setups in other posts. They will all do the same thing, allow your PS to communicate with an off-camera (OCF) or external flash. The setup I will be using is just the most convenient, efficient and failsafe. Since there is no hotshoe on the PS here is my Mod.
A: My modification uses an optical slave and a wireless (radio) trigger. By attaching the two together, it allows my on-camera flash to trigger the optical slave which in turn triggers the radio unit that triggers my off-camera flash (OCF) to go off. The OCF is placed somewhere, usually 45 degrees from the subject, to produce some dimensionality and not flat lighting as seen in the test shot below.
B: By placing the optical trigger as close as possible to the oncamera flash, I increase the reliability of the light trigger signal, which will help out immensely in outdoor day shots.
Normally, the optical slave is attached or built in to the external flash and can just be triggered by the onboard camera flash. So why not just use that? I will explain that in my most basic of setups and it can work in most common situations. However, as I stated earlier, this setup is the most failsafe and also will allow for some shooting that you can't do with the easy set up. This also allows me to dial down the onboard flash to it's lowest setting which will save on batteries and not affect the main picture by adding extra direct light.
Test shot: The image below was shot using the above setup. Tripod mounted Canon A570IS PS, self-portrait, on 10 second timer. Flash on lightstand camera right.
