New 430 ex ii, and I don't have a clue...

[shyeye]

Hey everyone!

I bought a Canon 430 ex ii a little bit ago, and really have no idea how to use it...
If anyone can give me any idea's I would love it.. other then reading the manual.. been there..done that.. and I think I'm even more confused.
My goal is to learn how to use it properly with my camera set to Manual... right now I use it with my camera in AV, and somehow I feel like I'm cheating cause it's not manual... or that I'm missing something... hmmm... anyways.. if someone could assist me, that would be wonderful!

[FormElement]

Easier to point you in the right direction.

First, get it OFF the camera. (for $39 you can get a cheap reasonably reliable wireless trigger set from china under a variety of knockoff names, "cactus" is one of them)

Then:
Strobist

For straight manual, you basically have two variables, zoom is the width of the beam, and power is the duration of the light.

For shooting bounce or fill light on camera, (typically in a walk-around or candid situation) I leave mine on ETTL with High Speed Sync, which lets me shoot even in broad daylight without having to stop down to f/16 or more.

[inkista]

First piece of advice: you don't want to shoot in M with flash if you're not comfortable shooting in M without flash. If you don't have iso/aperture/shutter speed and swapping stops among the settings and shooting in M down cold, don't add flash until you do.

I think the Strobist is a lot to take in as a beginner.

I'd say start with Planet Neil (or his book), and using the 430EX II on-camera to bounce at the beginning, and work your way outwards from there. Read the Strobist, but take it easy, the information overload can be particularly intense over there.

The main thing to understand is that when you take a flash photo, you're actually combining to exposures into your shot: the ambient light (i.e., everything that isn't the flash), AND the flash illumination.

The ambient light is controlled by all the stuff you're used to: iso, aperture, and shutter speed.

But the flash illumination has slightly different controls: power level, distance from subject, iso, and aperture. The flash burst is so fast that your shutter speed (well, below your x-sync speed) won't affect how much flash illumination you get from the flash.

Your metering in the camera doesn't include the flash illumination.

Av and flash is an ok combination if you want the flash to behave like your pop-up, but if you don't, it does limit you in a few ways, since the assumption is that you'll be using the flash for fill. The shutter speed is set roughly to what it would be for ambient exposure. So you can end up with a very slow shutter speed. This may not be what you want.

Mastering flash is mostly about figuring out how you want to balance the flash against the ambient. Full manual gives you the ability to do this. Shooting in Av and Tv tends to bias you towards more ambient and only a little fill flash (depending on your custom function settings). P and the green box Auto bias you more towards flash with almost no ambient. In the auto modes, it's sort of like being at one end of the spectrum or the other, and you can't choose to be in the middle.

[FormElement]

Originally Posted by inkista

I think the Strobist is a lot to take in as a beginner.

True, I should have pointed explicitly to Lighting 101

Even that is too much if you don't understand the basic settings on a strobe. But...

I broke down last week and bought pocket wizards. It's a very slippery slope!

P.S. - I saw the Enfuse test on your flicker page. I DL'd the mac version and will be playing with it later tonight.