If you own a detachable Speedlite-style flash, and you are shooting with it on your camera, you are wasting your investment in that expensive flash.
Face it, on-camera flash sucks. It drains the life out of your subject and makes everyone look like they are posing for a police line-up or a driver’s license photo.
You gotta get that flash off your camera!
The video above is my YouTube “commercial” for my off-camera flash course. Frankly I don’t know if it’s cheesy or if it’s cool, but I had fun making it, and people seem to love it on YouTube, so I thought I’d share it with you here.
I bought a Nissin Digital Speedlite Di22 for my Canon Eos Rebel recommended to me from a person at Adorama. Is this comparable to the Canon 430 EX that you recommend? I haven’t used it yet because I need to take your course in flash photography in the near future. Do you know anything about this flash? The man at Adorama told me that this was the flash I needed. Thanks. Debbie Sladen
Debbie, I believe you usually get what you pay for in camera gear, and I only buy Canon flashes for my Canon cameras. As I understand it the Nissin is compatible with the EOS cameras and functionally similar to the 430EX in most ways. It will certainly serve you as a starter flash. But I believe it lacks the built-in TTL wireless functionality you get when using all-Canon gear. It has a generic optical slave that will fire it when triggered by another flash, but that’s not the same as Canon’s TTL system. That won’t matter until you get to multi-flash setups, though, and it won’t matter if you like working with all-manual power settings and don’t intend to use TTL flash metering. You’ll learn more about all this if you watch my flash portrait course, but for now I hope that helps.