Your camera, as regular readers here know, is a light shifter. It shifts light to not “what it is”, but “what you want”.

So the first question you always (always) ask when doing a flash shot is, what should the ambient light do? What do I want?

And then you arrange your exposure triangle (Aperture, shutter speed, ISO) according to that need.

And then you add the flash.

The failure to do this leads to more flash confusion than anything else. It also leads to a creative failure. The studio may be well lit, but why use it like that? Increase shutter speed, close down the aperture, and lower ISO, and you can get a bright studio looking like this:

So again, when doing any flash shot at all, your first question is not about the flash, but about the embient.

I am teaching flash tonight st Sheridan College. Saturday at Vistek in Toronto. And in the coming weeks in Hamilton:  http://www.cameratraining.ca/Schedule.html it is worth being there if you want to unleash your creativity.