My lighting equipment arrived!!!

My lighting equipment arrived on schedule and in perfect condition as promised by B&H photo and video. I love that store! The box weighed just over 5 pounds so this set up will definately be portable (a must for me)! I had already watched a video on the Strobist website telling me how to set everything up that part went pretty fast!

Before getting this light setup I had been using my flash (Nikon SB-600) off camera (Nikon D300) by attaching it to a small tripod and using my pop up flash as a "master flash." To do this, I had to set up my camera in "commander mode." To find the "commander mode" on the D300 go to the "Custom Setting Menu" and chose "e Bracketing/flash" and then "e3 Flash cntrl for built-in flash" and finally "commander mode." Once in the Commander mode I turned off the built in flash by chosing -- for the mode (since I don't want it flashing while I'm shooting). Under "Group A" I chose the "M" mode (manual mode) and 1/1 under the"comp" column. I decided to use manual settings instead of TTL so I will have control over the light instead of leaving that up to the camera's metering system. I hope this will force me to learn more about what is going on, kind of like shooting my camer in manual forced me to figure out the relation between aperature/shutter speed/ISO. At the bottom of this screen I also had to pick a channel so I randomly decided on channel 3. You will be matching this setting on your flash so remember which channel you chose.

After setting up my camer I had to set up the flash so that it could recognize what the camera was telling it to do. The SB-600 can be set to the wireless remote flash mode by using the Cusom Settings. In the custom settings I also had to chose Group A and Channel 3 to match what I had selected on my camera. With that in place the two should work beautifully together as an off camera flash set up!

Since I had already set up my tripod and umbrella I just needed to attach my Nikon SB600 to the cold shoe on the umbrella bracket and I was ready to shoot. I popped up my built-in flash on my camera (which is not going to fire but needs to be up to make this whole thing work) and chose our cat, Tigger for my first subject (it didn't seem likely that he would move before I was ready to try a shot). Notice our terrible lighting in the house. Even though this shot was taken at night the lighting doesn't get a whole lot better during the day so figuring out this flash thing is going to be awesome!!!

I just did a quick shot here and of course Tigger woke up and left so I wasn't able to try anything like moving the light or changing my settings.
So then I convinced a few of the dogs to cooperate with me. They weren't as frightened by the set up as I thought they would be but weren't interested in helping me out for long. Here's a shot of Thoven with my shutter speed set to 250 to try to get rid of most of the background.

Brooklyn volunteered next. She was more nervous than Thoven and started to walk away as I was taking the photo. Without flash I would have had no photo because of the low light combined with her movement. While not a stellar shot I'm liking the possibilities!

Darby had gone to bed so last up was our foster dog, Pebbles. She's not too quick anyway but I love the low ISO and flash that allowed me to capture a little bubble coming out of her nose while she was breathing. She also allowed me to put the umbrella closer to her than the other dogs did so I'm anxious to experiment more with that.

Here's another shot of Pebbles turning away from the light. I love the shadows this angle created.

I think I may chose a non-moving subject to do my next experimenting on since it was hard to compare things when so many variables were changing as I shot. But I've started and taking that first step has made me excited to take more!!!