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you in the ballpark; all you have to do is
fine-tune. The fine-tuning is made easy with
CLS also. All of your adjustments are made
from right behind the camera with just one
glance at your LCD preview.
The Nikon Creative Lighting System is a very
complex tool, but all of the complexities are
taken care of within the camera system
itself. CLS takes twenty minutes worth of
metering and adjusting and does it all for
you in a matter of milliseconds. You can use
all this saved time to come up with more
creative images.
This chapter provides an overview of how
Nikon’s CLS uses the camera and com-
mander unit to communicate with the
remote units resulting in almost perfect
exposures every time.
How CLS Works with
Your Camera
The Nikon CLS isn’t a specific entity or set-
ting on your camera. All of the D2 series,
dSLRs as well as the D70/D70s, D50, and
D200 dSLRs are compatible with CLS. To
date, the only film camera that’s compatible
with CLS is the F6. Although all of these
cameras are compatible with CLS, not all of
them share the same functions.
Basically, the Nikon CLS is a communication
device. When set to i-TTL, the camera body
relays information to the commander unit.
The commander unit tells the remotes what
to do. The shutter opens and the remotes
fire. Sounds fairly simple, doesn’t it? And, in
all actuality, it is for you, but it’s definitely a
great feat of electronic engineering.
Broken down into more detail, the whole
system is based on pulse modulation. Pulse
modulation is a fancy term for the Speedlight
firing rapid bursts of light in a specific order.
Using these pulses, the commander unit, be
it a SB-800, SU-800, or a built-in Speedlight,
conveys instructions to the remote units.
The first instruction the commander sends
out to the remotes is to fire a series of mon-
itor pre-flashes to determine the exposure
level. These pre-flashes are read by the cam-
era’s i-TTL metering sensors, which combine
readings from all of the separate groups of
Speedlights along with a reading of the
ambient light.
The camera tells the commander unit what
the proper exposure needs to be. The com-
mander unit then, via pulse modulation,
relays specific information to each group
about how much exposure to give the sub-
ject. The camera then tells the commander
when the shutter is opened, and the com-
mander unit instructs the remote flashes to
fire at the specified output.
All of this is done in a split-second. Of
course when you press the Shutter button,
it looks like the flashes fire instantaneously.
There’s no waiting for the shutter to fire
while the Speedlights do their calculations.
Overview of Flash
Setup in the CLS
When setting up for a photo shoot, you first
need to decide how many Speedlights you
want to use. For most small projects you need
at least two Speedlights, one for your main or
key light and one for a fill light. When doing
portraits you may want to use as many as
76 Part II ✦ Creating Great Photos with the Creative Lighting System
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