Nikon® Creative Lighting System Digital Field Guide, Third Edition

Chapter 4: Advanced Wireless Lighting

One of the most amazing attributes of the Nikon Creative Lighting System is the Advanced Wireless Lighting (AWL) feature. As you probably already know, this feature allows you to use any number of speedlights off-camera to create a limitless range of lighting possibilities. The AWL feature can be infinitely tweaked. You can add as little or as much light as you desire. You can control all of this from one speedlight or an SU-800 on the camera’s hot shoe.

This is the most important feature of the Creative Lighting System because it enables you to progress from using the out-of-the-box camera flash to creating professional- looking images that are full of depth. Because you can automatically control the speedlight output, you can experiment with moving lights to create different effects, without worrying about changing the settings of your speedlights each time.

The Advanced Wireless Lighting feature of the Nikon CLS makes it easy to get studio-type lighting, even outdoors.

Flash Setup for Advanced Wireless Lighting

It’s always a good idea to have a plan going into a shoot. Knowing the components of the CLS system and how they function will help you choose the right piece of equipment for the job. The CLS is flexible enough to allow you to photograph the following situations:

• Portraits. When shooting portraits, you can set up the speedlights ...