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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spb_stan" data-source="post: 636264" data-attributes="member: 43545">We all are beginners in some aspects of photography. I shot film for years, just recording life events and no serious intent, but did develop my B&W film. By luck made a lot of money from a few shots during album recordings processes of catching moody B&W images that were licensed to record companies for the album covers.I got into Digital first when the D90 came out. Still have it and it has about 150,000 frames on it. My GF uses it so I don't see it much. The second photo should have been described better, a key in that was was trying to expose the background just enough to see what it was but it was very dark so used a very long shutter time but the flash froze her although she was moving. On the right side, her left arm...you can see ghosting  because she moved her arm in my 1/2 second exposure.  That works better when the movement is further in the background but I picked that one as an example of dragging the shutter, a term used to set a very slow shutter to get ambient, but set the flash to expose the subject with Rear Curtain(when the flash is set to trigger at the end of the shutter open period instead of the normal beginning of the opening.  That shot was not a keeper, I did have that one jpg, because of the ghosting. The cameras are getting so feature rich that  it can be distracting with so many options making it harder to learn the fundamentals. The fundamentals would be easier to master the important exposure Triad of speed, sensitivity and aperture if that is all one had to think about.It is fun to experiment with flash because you do not have to wait for conditions to be right like you do with landscape or anything where natural light is all you have.  After a little experience with it, flash becomes more useful than most of us thought, for example, mid-day sun was something you just did not shoot  people in  due to the harsh shadows but with powerful speed lights you can soften the hard high contrast shadows with flash or fill backlit scenes that normally would show the subject black and the background exposed correctly/Here is an example of a shot that would not work without flash or a big reflector. I show this trying show a girl in the park trying to shoot her friend laying in autumn leaves. The sun was from the back, so her camera was exposing in  auto mode, for the sunset and light reflecting of a canal and a white boat in the background. I suggested turning on her flash but it was just  too weak as built-in flashes normally are. I stepped back 10 feet behind the girlfriend taking the photos and aimed my SB900 directly towards the subject and used Matrix metering which considers the whole scene but biases it towards the focus point. With so big a difference between the girl's face and the bright background Matrix let the background blow out a little and my external flash filled in foreground. That is the normal operation of flash when  using Matrix metering, it switches the flash to TTL BL mode, balancing ambient with flash. This is the normal operation without me doing anything, All I did was turn on the flash power switch. While her friend tried 30 shots and nothing worked. The white boat and reflection from the water was about 5 stops brighter than the girl. I backed up because my 70-200 was on the camera so needed some distance. Without flash or large reflectors, the shot was impossible. With flash is was just automatic. That is why the Nikon flash/camera system is the best in the industry. [ATTACH]266155[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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