Originally posted by mom2mny I've never used a flash other than the camera's regular flash. Most of my photos are taken outside, ex. birds, butterflies, flowers, landscapes I do take some pictures indoors like at Christmas, birthday parties, etc. Would a speedlight be helpful for any of those?
Very helpful to all of those except landscape (and even with landscape it is possible to make creative use of flash, especially off-camera).
Flash is surprisingly useful outdoors. This was a revelation to me - I got this tip from a member here. The main use outdoors is for "fill" - that is, to supplement the ambient light - rather than as the main source. It helps to bring out detail and colour in birds ...
... animals
... flowers
... insects
... and spiders
The main thing here is not to overdo it. You can adjust the flash exposure; I generally set it so that the flash adds no more than say 0.7-1.5 stops to the exposure. The ideal is that you can't tell that the photo was taken with a flash, except perhaps for a nice catchlight in the eye of the subject.
Fill is helpful when shooting with backlighting, to even up the exposure ...
Of course you may need it for the main light, rather than fill, for nocturnal animals.
The key in this situation is to get the flash off the camera, to avoid the "deer-in-the-headlights" look. This was with the compact, lightweight and inexpensive Godox TT350P held at arm's length in my left hand, triggered by an on-camera Godox XPro-P (another TT350P or other Godox TTL flash like the V1 could also do this). (I used this technique for some of the photos above too, such as the insect shot and the flower shot, in which I also used a cheap diffuser to soften the flash beam.)
The TT350P has been mentioned earlier - it is also sold by Adorama rebranded as Flashpoint:
https://www.adorama.com/fplfsmminip.html
With photos indoors, your shots can be transformed by good use of flash. This usually involves diffusing the flash - that is, using the flash on-camera and bouncing the beam off walls, ceilings, reflectors, etc or using it off-camera with the light spread by a softbox, flash umbrella or the like.
Starting with on-camera, there is a lot of information about how to use bounce flash effectively, but Neil van Niekerk is a good place to start:
Bounce flash photography tutorial How to bounce your flash
You will see that he often uses a piece of black material (his home-made "black foamie thing") to direct the flash to bounce off a wall or something, so that no flash hits the subject directly:
Video tutorial - Using the 'black foamie thing'
This is not just for pros. "Flagging" a flash like this can work well in everyday domestic situations, as @mcgregni has shown here:
Indoor Exposure Mixing - PentaxForums.com Little Fairy - PentaxForums.comFlashes, A Flag and Domestic Portraits Flashes, A Flag and Domestic Portraits