four Speedlights: one for your key light, one
for your fill, one for a background light, and one
for a hair light. Depending on what camera
you’re using, this can mean five Speedlights,
including one to be used as a commander
unit. This is, of course, an extreme example.
You can achieve great results using the built-
in flash as a commander and one Speedlight.
If you’re using a D2X, D2H, or a D50, you’ll
need to add either an SB-800 Speedlight or
an SU-800 Commander to control the
remote Speedlights.
Step 1: Choose a Flashmode
Now you need to decide which flash mode
you want to use. The three flash modes
available when using the Advanced Wireless
System are TTL, AA, and M. I recommend
using TTL, as it gets you as close as you need
to be without the need for making endless
adjustments. The Auto Aperture setting
tends to underexpose, requiring adjustment
of all of the groups. The Manual setting is
almost the same as using studio strobes. You
need to make exposure calculations to
decide what to set the output levels to.
For more specifics on using the
Flash modes, see Chapter 2.
Step 2: Choose a channel
After you decide which flash mode you
want to use, the next step is to decide which
channel you want to work on. This decision
should be pretty simple. For the most part,
it’s unlikely you’ll be working in close prox-
imity to other photographers, so you can
use whatever channel you’d like. In the
unlikely event you are working near another
photographer using Nikon CLS, just ask
them which channel they’re using and use a
different one. I usually use channel three
simply because when I first started using
CLS, I was using a D70, and the built-in
Speedlight works as a commander only on
channel three. Essentially, it really makes no
difference what channel you use as long as
there are no other photographers near you
using Nikon CLS.
Step 3: Set up groups
The next step is setting up groups.
Generally, you want to set your main lights
to one group, the fill lights to one group,
and any peripheral lights, such as hair and
background lights to another group. You
want to do it this way so you can adjust the
output of the specific lights based on their
functions. Your main light is the brightest;
probably pretty close to whatever TTL read-
ing your camera comes up with. The fill
lights need to be a little under what the TTL
reading is, so by setting them to a separate
group you can adjust them without altering
the exposure of your mains. The background
lights may or may not need adjusted depend-
ing on the darkness of the background,
whether you’re shooting high key or low key,
and so on. You want these lights in a sepa-
rate group to enable you make the neces-
sary adjustments without affecting the other
two exposures.
When using the built-in
Speedlights as a commander
there are some limitations to the
number of groups available to
use. The D70/s allows only one
group to be set, and the D200
and D80 allow Speedlights to be
set in two groups.
Note

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