I thought it would be nice to share some of my thoughts and ideas when it comes to lighting and photography. First of all, I live by the Strobist.com philosophy. You don´t need big studio flashes to accomplish good light. You can do the same thing only using small speedlights. And as a Nikon user I´m using a Sb-800 and it´s a very powerful little fellow! Since I´m not the guy with the golden pants I only have one flash at the moment. But when I need to use more than one flash (usually everytime I shoot something) I give my good friend Coffe.dk a call and he lends me a Canon 430 ex. And if a need more than that I call another friend, CherryCheek haha! to get one more ex 430.
Good stuff, the only bad thing is that I can´t use TTL with the canon flashes. If I only use my SB-800, I can control it wireless from my Nikon D80 and that is a time saver. Not only because I´m lazy and don´t need to run back and forth to the flash but also because the camera and the flash is doing all the math and light calculations for me. The only thing I usually need to think of are if I want to use shutter or aperture priority. I usually use aperture priority so I can decide what kind of depth of field I like to use. So, say that I prefer working at an aperture of f2.8 and I´m in aperture priority, then the camera calculates what shutter speed I need. And here comes the good stuff, with the SB-800 in TTL mode triggered wireless from my camera the flash now calculates how much power it needs to make a good picture. Awesome!
So what if it´s a kind of difficult scene i´d like to take a photo of, and the flash believes that it needs more (or less) light from the flash than it actually needs? Simple! I leave the shutter speed and aperture alone and go into the menu of my D80. Navigate to the built in flash menu (since it´s the camera flash that triggers the SB-800) and change the exposure compensation to a negative or positive value. The value depends of course of the scene you are taking a photo of.
I don´t think that the text above made any sense at all so that´s why I will make some practical examples with pictures and sketches. Stay tuned!
Life isnt about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. -George Bernard Shaw