So today instead of picking up a lens I picked up a sb-800 for my d80.

Anyone has any pointers for me as a beginner, just general rule of thumb or reads.

I've played around with it and works really well, althought i'm having trouble getting the wirelessflash setup to work, but its not that important.

Thanks guys!

 

There are some great resources on the net for flash tutorials. One I highly recommend is strobist.blogspot.com or more specifically, the lighting 101 tutorials: http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101.html

 

Thanks dan thats something i was looking for the book doesn't really teach much but the features.

 

Great question! Thanks for the link, Dan.

 

Welcome to the world of flash! I got an SB-600 for Christmas and still haven't mastered the thing. But I do know how to do wireless with the D80.

You need the camera to be in commander mode and the on-camera flash needs to be up. Go to the Custom Settings menu and under option 22 for Built-in Flash you want to change from TTL (or whatever you have set) to Commander mode. This will bring you to a sub-menu where you can adjust the modes for the built-in flash while in commander mode as well as Group A and B. I tend to disable the built-in flash and set Group A to manual (same group as what my SB-600 is set to).

The other thing you need to do is set your flash to Wireless remote flash mode. No doubt this is different for the SB-800 vs. SB-600, but the manual should tell you what to do.

Once you've changed your settings you can do some experimentation. The "wireless" mode is triggered by a pulse of flashes from the on-camera flash so even if you disable it in the commander mode menu it still needs to be up in order for wireless to work.

That should be enough to get you started, hopefully I didn't confuse you more. Have fun!

 

There might be a better thread to post this in (I can't recall what thread I was asking for flash help) but this one will do.

Here is something blatently obvious in retrospect, but it took me till now to figure out:
On camera flash doesn't have high speed sync support. This means, with the on camera flash popped, your shutter speed has a minimum of something like 1/250.

Why is that important? Because given the lighting conditions, and the current F stop, 1/250 shutter might be EXTREMELY overexposed.

Let's say you are shooting in daylight, in aperture mode, and you shoot a picture
at F 2.8, and the camera decides 1/2000 shutter. Okay, the picture is fine, except
you want some fill flash. So you pop the flash and shoot.

Now the picture is shot as F 2.8, 1/250 shutter + flash, and is completely overexposed.
If you were paying attention you might notice the 1/250 was blinking, warning you
of this. But it isn't obvious what is going on.

The solution is to then start cranking up the F stop (probably till F8) until the
shutter speed is supposed to be 1/250 or more. The shutter indicator stops blinking,
and all is well.

- Frank

 

That works, but if you need the larger aperture for the composition, you can also add negative flash compensation, just like you can add negative exposure compensation. I tend to do this with fill flash anyway, although I generally muck it up still...

 

I have read my flash manual 3 times and still just muddle my way through it with lots of throwaway exposures...

There is 2 pieces to it - one is the lighting-101 tutorial that Dan mentioned (a must see). The other is actually understanding how to make your flash do what it does... Sometimes I think my flash is more complicated than my camera.

Have fun.

 

Wow talk about an old thread, yea i bought a digital field guide for nikon cls. Learn the basic points and looking to get another flash to do some more wireless work.