The Nikon D90 pop-up fill flash is a handy tool for many occasions but can become a nasty flood light in certain tricky situations. A situation which I encountered today.
It was an extremely sunny day here today and an attempt was made to capture some kids shots at the shaded foyer. My first attempt was to usually do it without flash or compensation. Alas! The darkened faces confirmed that the camera is struggling to accommodate the humongous light spectrum. Unsurprisingly, the Nikon D90 kept the background intact at the expense of darkened faces.
As it turned out, the use of the pop-up flash to act as a filler was a very bad idea in this case. The background was blown out of recognition (complete overexposed) while the kids' faces are too, blown out like solar flare! What happened? You tell me. Thankfully, to quickly savage the situation, I instantaneously whipped out my Nikon SB-900, slide out the built-in diffuser and fired away. Yeah! Peace sets into the valley soon after. Both the background and kids' faces have been brought back into the hills of acceptance. The Nikon SB-900 rocks!
O right, the above shot was taken in F/2.8 with the Nikkor 35mm G lens in Aperture priority mode. The SB-900 was mounted on camera for this shot.