David J. Littleboy wrote:
"Savageduck" wrote:
On 2012-04-06 19:28:16 -0700, "David J. Littleboy" said:

My advice would be to ebay the Metz and get a Nikon flash. I picked up a
used earlier model (now two generation out of date) Canon flash for use
with
the 5D and now 5D2. It's friggin amazing. Zooms along with the lens from
24
to 105mm (for longer reach at longer focal lengths) has a fold-out
diffuser
for 14mm superwide But best of all, it nails the exposure every time all
the
time: in testing it, I tried to find a subject that it would mess up the
exposure on, and couldn't. And the latest ones have even more features.
Get
the cheapest one that will do bounce flash and has enough power.

Yup!
I have an SB-800. It works great on both my D70 & D300s with no issues. It
just does what is expected of it.

Life is much better than it used to be. In the good old days (e.g. 1970 or
so), you used to have a flash head, a capacitors bank (in the handle), a
monster bracket/grip, wires all over the place, a battery pack over your
shoulder. And for exposure, you prayed...

Back then I often used two flashes, sometimes three, one on a wire,
and the rest on optical triggers. But I didn't pray. I used an
incident light meter with flash measurement capability. Still got it,
and two of the flashes I used then, plus a few more, all now triggered
by radio. I still set them up manually with the meter.

Paying as much for a modern flash gun as a good lens just to automate
what's easily done manually seems a bit steep :-) But I tend to use
flash only for carefully set up situations. True I don't have the
modern flash capability of running around an event taking
opportunistic snaps and having the exposure come out right by TTL
metering. Instead I have to mount two big ceiling bounces in opposite
corners to light the entire room, sometimes augmented by some local
on-camera distance-controlled flash shadow fill. Modern dynamic range
takes care of the errors :-)

--
Chris Malcolm