We present a novel method for automatic fingerspelling recognition which is able to discriminate complex hand configurations with high amounts of finger occlusions. Such a scenario, while common in most fingerspelling alphabets, presents a challenge for vision methods due to the low intensity variation along important shape edges in the hand image. Our approach is based on a simple and cheap modification of the capture setup: a multi-flash camera is used with flashes strategically positioned to cast shadows along depth discontinuities in the scene, allowing efficient and accurate hand shape extraction. We then use a shift and scale invariant shape descriptor for fingerspelling recognition, demonstrating great improvement over methods that rely on features acquired by traditional edge detection and segmentation algorithms.