Say hello to my little friend.

I bought a speedlight flash for my camera, the Yongnuo YN500ex. I’ve wanted a camera mounted flash for a while…the little pop up flash on my camera washes everything out, but without it a lot of my inside pictures are so dark and grainy. I did a lot of research and settled on this one because:

The price was right (it was 1/3 the cost of the Canon model) and was still compatible with my camera

It could swivel and pivot, so I can direct the light in any direction

It has High Speed Sync (HSS) which means it can be used with even really high shutter speeds (up to 1/8000)

It has TTL (through the lens) metering which means it’s pretty much snap and go on my camera. Other models you had to manually adjust the flash itself because they didn’t synchronize with the camera’s settings

The size was smaller than some of the other models I was looking at, it fits well on my little camera

Can be used wirelessly as a slave flash, meaning I can have it trigger off camera. Not that I think I’ll ever really use this feature, but you never know

Can be used with cropped frame and full frame cameras. I’m perfectly happy with the not professional level, cropped frame camera I have and don’t really see myself putting down 2k for a full frame camera, but again, you never know.

So yeah, I did a ton of research (trust me I didn’t know anything about this a few weeks ago). We bought one from ebay and it arrived from China today, haha. It’s going to be a bit of a learning curve, but I’m excited to explore something new with photography. The manual is hysterical though, terribly translated English :)