|
Flash is often one of the most overused and least-understood parts of photography. It's not hard to see why when you try to browse through Nikon's near-incomprehensible manual for the SB800 Speedlight flash.
It gets worse; there's three names for essentially the same thing - iTTL, Creative Lighting System and Nikon's Advanced Wireless Lighting.
Then, within every flash system, there's a host of letters and settings to learn - TTL, FP, BL, A, AA, GN, M, RPT. All of these settings can be accessed by repeatedly pressing the 'mode' button on your flashgun. Someone really ought to inform the acronym police, here.
Forget the acronyms. While we are busy forgetting things, you can more or less ignore M, A, and AA in practical terms when using on-camera flash. These are Manual, Auto and Auto Aperture modes, useful for using the flash with older Nikons or controlling the flash in a totally predictable setting, like a studio environment.
|
|
You can also skip GN (or Guide Number), which is useful for understanding the output of your flash, but of little real-world use except for some manual exposure macro work. RPT - short for repeating or stroboscopic flash - is a useful setting, but beyond the scope of this feature.
Instead, with our flash still planted firmly in the hot-shoe of a modern iTTL compatible camera (which means any current Nikon DSLR and models like the D2H and D70), we are left with TTL and TTL BL, with the flash defaulting to TTL BL. The BL bit stands for 'balanced fill-flash' (more realistically, think it 'balancing light').
This means in TTL BL mode, the camera and flash will attempt to set an exposure that handles both the available light in the background and the flash filling in the foreground. This is ideal for taking pictures outdoors, or for filling in strong back lighting, although personally I prefer to dial this down, usually to -2/3 stops, by pressing the minus sign on the dial on the back of the flash.
In contrast, TTL is like putting your own little ray of sunshine atop your camera. It doesn't care about balancing available light, it just lights whatever's in front of it. Again, this is arguably set too high as standard, and I often dial this down, from anything between -1/3 and -1 2/3 stops.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Take the flash off the hot-shoe, press a few buttons on flash and camera and you can now use your flash off-camera, controlled directly by your camera (you need to match the channel and group setting on flash and camera or controller).
There are no rules here, except for keeping the flash in sight of the IR sensor or pop-up flash on your camera. Experiment with what suits you in terms of exposure settings. I often use an old D70 in my right hand and a SB800 in my outstretched left, but you can do so-o-o much more, by placing the flash on a small light stand.
The addition of a second flash can make a profound difference, drastically changing the balance between subject and background, or adding greater modelling of the subject itself. Non-headless people react even better to a subtle bit of rim lighting on the hair, but given the lack of hair (or head) of the sitter, the light has been set lower than usual to pick out the shoulder.
Of course this is only the beginning. You could have banks of lights, gelled and snooted, or brollied and balanced with room lighting with effect. The possibilities are endless. If you own a Nikon camera like the D70, D80 or D200, buy a flashgun like the SB600 or SB800. Learn how to set the commander mode (it differs slightly from camera to camera) and start taking pictures with off camera flash. You'll be surprised at the results.
