Nikon D7000 manual Flash Techniques, Using Zoom Heads

422 David Busch’s Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography

for ISO 100 as you might expect for a unit used to photograph subjects that are often inches from the camera. It has a fixed coverage angle of 78 degrees horizontal and 60 degrees vertical, but the flash head tilts down to 60 degrees and up to 45 degrees (with detents every 15 degrees in both directions). In this case, “up” and “down” has a differ- ent meaning, because the SB-R200 can be mounted on the SX-1 Attachment Ring mounted around the lens, so the pair of flash units are on the sides and tilted toward or away from the optical axis. It supports i-TTL, D-TTL, TTL (for film cameras), and Manual modes.

Flash Techniques

Entire books have been written on using Nikon electronic flash units, and the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS). Even in a 500-plus page book like this one, I don’t have room to show you how to use every feature of every flash unit. Instead, I’m going to use this next section to discuss what specific capabilities are included in the Nikon D7000’s built-in flash, as well as some of the key features of the Nikon dedicated exter- nal flash units.

After reading this, you’ll know more about what you can do, and will explore the con- trols and settings that will let you move beyond this overview. If you’d like an amazing practical guide to flash photography in general, I recommend Joe McNally’s Hot Shoe Diaries. You can find basic information on flash photography and lighting techniques in my book David Busch’s Quick Snap Guide to Lighting. Like Joe’s book, it is non-Nikon- specific, but shows you tricks of studio lighting, and other techniques that you can eas- ily apply to your D7000 camera and its flash units.

Using Zoom Heads

External flash zoom heads can adjust themselves automatically to match lens focal lengths in use reported by the D7000 to the flash unit, or you can adjust the zoom head position manually if you want to use a setting that doesn’t correspond to the automatic setting the flash will use. With older flash units, like the SB-600, automatic zoom adjust- ment wastes some of your flash’s power, because the flash unit assumes that the focal length reported comes from a full-frame camera. Because of the 1.5X crop factor, the flash coverage when the flash is set to a particular focal length will be wider than is required by the D7000’s cropped image.

You can manually adjust the zoom position yourself, using positions built into the flash unit that more closely correspond to your D7000’s field of view when using a flash that does not, like the SB-900, automatically take into account the difference between FX (full-frame) and DX (APS-C) coverage. Table 12.1 shows the actual focal length of a lens (or focal length position of a zoom lens) in the left column, with the closest zoom head position on the flash unit in the right column.