Beginners Digital Photography Zone

Shoe Flash

By admin, April 4, 2010

Shoe Flash Shoe Flash
Tips & Tricks for using flash on the hot shoe of a Nikon D80?

Shooting in a vfw hall. First time using a flash on the hot shoe of my Nikon D80. The flash is a Promaster 7500DX. I will be shooting movement and still shots. I just need any tips, pointers, beginner tips that could help at all. I am very familiar with my Nikon D80, just a beginner at flash photog. Thank you!
The place that I am shooting as at a VFW Hall. It's a hall for weddings.

From what I have seen, that is a decent flash, and as I'm sure you know, quite a lot less expensive than a Nikon unit.

When shooting indoors such as you will be, I always shoot in Shutter priority mode. Set a speed of about 1/40. This will give you some more ambient light in the scene. Your flash is then basically being utilized as a fill light unit. Let the camera select the aperture. If you have a good, fast lens, you can use lower ISO numbers, something around ISO 200 or 300. If your lens is the kit lens, you will probably need to up your ISO into the 800 range. Some diffusion is really needed on the flash to soften the harsh light and sharp, black shadows that result with direct flash. The Stofen Omni Bounce is the easiest, smallest, to use, and does a fair job. With this, you tilt the flash head to a 45 degree angle at all times. My favorite diffuser is the Gary Fong Lightsphere. This gives beautiful, soft, even light, but is rather large and somewhat cumbersome if you are not used to it. Although the through the lens automatic exposure control is SUPPOSED to give you correct flash exposures, you will often still have to add +1 to the EV power on the flash unit when using a diffuser.

Frankly, the best thing you can do is lots of practice. Once you hit on some good shutter speed, ISO, and flash EV compensation settings, you should be good to go in most any indoor situation.

Oh, also, in most cases, setting your white balance to FLASH will give you more accurate color, but hopefully, you will be shooting in RAW, so you can always adjust / tweak white balance in post processing if needed. Still, the less you have to do after the shoot, the better. Again, this is something you will need to experiment with. The Auto white balance setting may or may not work better with your camera / flash combination.

steve

EDIT: The answer above me came in as I was typing mine. You will notice we are telling you two different things to do, i.e. him saying use Aperture priority, me saying use Shutter priority. We are both correct. As he said, it really all depends on the look you want and the conditions. I shot mostly indoor weddings with my flash / diffuser setup, and so I needed to have the ambient lighting in the church to show in my photos. Yes, at times there can be color issues, but I used an amber dome with my frosted Gary Fong Lightsphere to help balance out indoor and flash lighting.

Again, using on camera flash is yet another art in itself. We can give you tips and tell you how WE do / have done it, but you are really going to need to experiment and learn much of this on your own and apply it to your photography, just like how you learned to use your camera to best suit your purposes.

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