Today, I persuaded Sam to do some modeling for me, which was probably more fun for me than for her. I took a whole bunch of photos, all with the same background and zoom on the camera, but all with different lighting setups. Between each shot, I drew (or modified) a diagram of what the setup was for that shot, and photographed that. I was left with a load of photos, all in pairs, so I could match up the photo with the lights and settings that made it.

I found some deeply unflattering ways to set up a couple of little strobes – one at each side for two upward-pointing nose-shadows is an especially bad look!

Diffuse light is better, but a strobe on one side coupled with the on-camera flash at a low setting worked really quite nicely too.

Anyway, if you’re starting out with lighting, it’s a great way of trying out a load of ideas in a reasonably short time. Make sure you have your diagrams either kept or photographed, so you can match them up later, and you can see what worked and what didn’t.

As part of my new kit, I also bought a Nikon SB-600 flash.  Coupled with the D90 camera, it’s everything you need for fully automatic off-camera lighting.  There are more powerful flashes, but it’s something I’ve never done before, so I’ve no idea if it will really prove useful to me very often, or will just be used occasionally.

It took a bit of fiddling to get it up and running – a few things may not be immediately obvious:

• The on-camera flash needs to be up to control the external flash.

• The SB-600 isn’t set to be a wireless slave by default.  You need to turn that option on.  ‘Zoom’ and ‘-’ together get you into the menu.  ‘+’ and ‘-’ select what you’re changing – the wireless remote mode is a squiggly arrow.  Use ‘Mode’ to change it to ‘On’, then briefly press the power button to set it.  The display should show the squiggly arrow.

• The camera needs to be set to ‘commander mode’ using custom setting ‘e2′.  Set the built-in flash to ‘–’, so it doesn’t fire, set both groups to ‘TTL’, and set your channel.  It doesn’t matter what channel you use, but the flash and camera must be the same.  The SB-600 will default to ’3′, and the camera will default to ’1′.

If you’ve done all that lot, and I haven’t missed anything out, you should be able to pop the flash pretty much anywhere, and the camera will control it.  By default, the flash will beep a couple of times when it fires, so you know it worked.

In theory, the flash needs a line-of-sight view of the camera, within 30 degrees of the front, and can only be a short distance away.  In practice, indoors, it seems to work in almost any position, and even outdoors, it’s nothing like as touchy as Nikon suggest.

My first attempt was in an underpass in Exmouth – a mural painted by the local school kids.  It was light enough to get a shot, but would have been quite flat with no definite light source.  I put the SB-600 on the ground, to the left of the shot, sitting on its little ‘foot’.  It’s pointing up at an angle towards the area I was photographing:

Later, when we were in the pub for lunch, I decided to recreate a shot from David Hobby of Strobist.  My dad and I are the models.  The SB-600 is sitting between us and the menu, pointing at the menu:

Sam operated the camera, and it was her first time trying it – it focused on the bar instead of us, but the idea worked out ok.

I doubt that flash is something I’ll ever do a lot of, but Nikon CLS makes it easy to achieve some interesting effects, without spending too much time learning and experimenting.  If you want to learn and experiment, or just get lots of ideas, head over to Strobist.