Better Point-and-Shoot Shots with an External Flash

Last weekend, one of our friends celebrated their daughter's birthday party.  On this kind of occasion, I don't usually bring a DSLR anymore - I feel it is a little too much when we're not the celebrants.  Instead, I brought our trusty Lumix LX5 (reviewed here).  However, to get the best image quality out of the LX5, I paired it with an external flash, the Yongnuo YN-560EX (reviewed here).

Yes, the 560EX is a manual not TTL flash.  (I don't have a dedicated TTL flash for the Lumix LX5.)  However, using a manual flash while shooting run-and-gun is actually easier than it sounds.  (See: Therapy for TTL Addiction: How to Use Manual Flash).

In this post, I'll discuss my thought process in setting the flash and ambient exposures.

Yongnuo YN-560EX (EX600) Review

This is a follow up to my preliminary review of the Yongnuo YN-560EX.  For convenience, I'm going to incorporate the information on the previous review in this one, so this will be the main resource page for the 560EX.

ABOUT THE YONGNUO YN-560EX
The YN-560EX (formerly EX600) is a manual flash but can act as a wireless TTL slave via Canon or Nikon's wireless flash commanders (yes it is cross-compatible with Canon and Nikon).  I was excited about this model because it's only $109.99, less than the YN-565EX (which has wireless TTL as well as on-camera TTL and costs around $160 for the Nikon version).  It is one of the cheapest wireless TTL flashes available.  (At the end of this article I will post other wireless TTL alternatives.)

The YN-560EX should not be mistaken with its similarly-named predecessors, the YN-560 (a purely manual flash) and the YN-560II (an updated version of the YN-560, also purely manual).  The 560EX was previously known as the EX600 but its name was finalized as the 560EX.