something smells fishy in the state california,

today I went with Kim and her cute little daughter to take some potraets of them (which turned to be excellent, since I just finished the first sd card and have around 25 shots already) and my camera misfired about 50% of the tim...

you press the shutter button and it just refuses to fire. Now It could be that the onboard flash just overheated, since it worked fine when I use it without the flash. Which I just hope and which tells me I shoot to many pictures and should get a dedicated commander or worse pocketwizards (perfect solution just so expensive...)

I also ended up with alot of natural light shot's which seem to be quiete nice. It's impressive what happens at the golden hour. They just have this WOW quality and need barley postprocessing.

Ok how do I shoot potraits?

available light only:

1. go in manual mode
2. set your desired aperature
3. set your desired shutter speed
4. set auto iso to 800 and let it figure out the rest
5. as metering matrix or spot metering, depending on situation

flash and available light combination:

1. go in manual mode
2. set shutter speed to 1/250th
3. set an aperature of your choice
4. set iso two 200 - 400 to reduce the workload for the flashs
5. arange you light's, basically one on the left, one from the front
6. set them to 1/2
7. chimp with the display,iso,flash power,aperature till you get the correct exposure
8. balance with the ambient light. Rule of dumb, the slower the shutter speed, the more ambiant light you get

important lesson:

put some heavy stuff on your lightstands/umbrellas. Since the wind blows them over which means you loose 40$ for some new umbrellas or try to fix them with ducttape.