Off Camera Flash

The great thing about SLR cameras is the flexibility to do so many different things in terms of lighting, interchangeable lenses, etc.
Beautiful natural light is the best.  But, as we all know, often the light outdoors is just not the light you were hoping for.  It's either too bright, too many shadows, not bright enough, the list goes on.  The cool thing about getting the flash off camera is that you can simulate exactly the lighting scenario you want.
In this family portrait below, the sun was still pretty high in the sky casting shadows and causing the background to be too bright.  I under exposed the overall scene by 1.3 stops to darken the background and bring in detail.  Then I increased the output of the flash by about 1 stop to get back the light I lost by under exposing the whole scene.  The result is an image that looks more like it was shot at sunset, not mid day.

            

In this example I used Nikon's CLS system with a SU800 commander mounted on my D3.  Only one SB900 flash was used camera right.  I used a 1/2 CTO (color temperature orange) filter on the flash to warm up the image as bit.
If you have never tried off camera flash, give it a try.