Many users of point-and-shoot cameras never take their flash off of autoflash mode, but most cameras come with a mode called fill flash (or fill-in flash, flash-on, anytime flash, or something close. They all mean the same thing: that the flash fires every time you take a picture.

Why would you want flash when the subject is bright already? To fill unwanted shadows with light. High sun in particular creates unattractive hollows under facial features. Great Aunt Gretyl might come to your Labor Day cookout wearing an old-fashioned, wide-brimmed hat. You want to document what could be her last earthly appearance, but the brim of her hat throws her entire kindly face into darkness. Add fill flash and that shadow lightens up.

Fill flash is really as much a no-brainer as autoflash — and no less automatic in its operation, pumping out the right amount of light for the occasion. You have to select fill flash with the flash mode button, of course. But once you do, you can leave fill flash on, and if you go indoors, it does the job there, too.

And how do you get fill flash if your point-and-shoot doesn't have any way to display a fill-flash icon? Even cameras with few controls often have a fill-flash button, usually marked with a lightning bolt. But to get fill flash, you must hold down this button until the flash-ready light comes on, and only then take the picture. You can do the same thing with most one-time-use cameras.

Fill flash compensates for the inability of photographic film, or the image sensor in a digital camera, to capture good detail in both the brightest and the darkest parts of some subjects. Though fill flash adds the same amount of light to both bright and shadowy areas, the extra light is more visible in the shadows.