I have joined an awesome community called The Salted Collective which was established by the very talented Leah McLean.  This community is all about learning and sharing with each other.  The main topic is off camera flash, but that is not the only topic.

I have had a flash for years but never really looked into using it.  I mainly shoot natural light, but with winter coming and the dull, dreary days we've been having I have decided to bring out the flash and learn to use it. 

It is all very confusing for me but the main gist of it is this:  The aperature controls the amount of flash light, the shutter speed controls the amount of ambient light.  The trick is to balance the type of light.  Along with Leah's site I have also learned quite a bit from the Strobist  blog,  as well as the Tangents blog from Neil van Neikerk.

These images were all taken with a Nikon D90 and a 40mm Nikon Macro lens.  The settings were 1/200 and the aperature between f3.0 and f4.0.  The ISO was 100 and flash was on manual @ 1/16 power.  Why these settings?  Well 1/200 is the sync speed on the D90 and f3.0 was the widest aperature for this lens.  I wanted the fastest ISO for my camera and I started at 1/4 flash power.  The shots were somewhat blown out so i reduced the flash power until I liked the results.

Yes, there ARE 37 different ways to photograph carrots *grins*

Are these shot underexposed?  Flash power too low?  I think they look ok and I achieved the dark and moody background I was going for.  These were taken at noon.  Happy Sunday!