Let there be light

I made a small addition to my small collection of photography gear today (if it even qualifies as a collection).

That's a Nikon SB-400 "Speedlight" ("Speedlight" is apparently what Nikon calls a flash to make it sound cool.)  It's roughly the most basic add-on flash on the market, but it's a fairly big improvement over the flash that's built into my D40.  Case in point ... the following two pictures:

A mannequin's arm with the D40's built-in flash

The mannequin's arm with the SB-400

Ignoring the fact that neither of these pictures are good, the first one has very obvious hard shadows under the table and behind the arm, as well as a bright reflection on the elbow and pretty complete wash-out of the table surface.  The light also falls off a lot toward the edges of the picture, and this wasn't even taken as a particularly wide shot.  The second one, by comparison has much more natural looking light.  Both of these pictures were taken using the camera's TTL (Through The Lens) system to let it automatically set the flash intensity, but with the SB-400 I was able to tilt the flash to point upward from the camera to reduce the intensity of the light hitting the arm and table.  From where I sit it looks like a pretty huge improvement for the zero effort it took to get the better shot.

The wash-out in the first picture has been a very large problem for me when trying to take pictures of people and objects, so I'm pretty excited to have just a little bit more flexibility in my lighting.  The SB-400 can also be moved off-camera with a cheap cable, so my photo taking capabilities have just improved fairly notably.