Lighting and Control

Creative Lighting System

The Coolpix digital cameras also contain a special creative lighting system; The SB-900 Speedlight offers the choice of three light output patterns. They consist of the standard, center-weighted, and even patterns. These patterns provide flash illumination for almost every shooting situation.

The standard pattern is basic illumination for usual flash shooting environments. The center-weighted pattern provides larger guide numbers at the center of the image than other illumination patterns at the same focal length, making it particularly suitable for portraits. With the even pattern, the light falloff at the edge of the image is less than with the standard illumination pattern, making the pattern ideal for shooting group photographs indoors.

i-TTL Flash Control

Nikon's technology i-TTL, which means intelligent through-the-lens, is Balanced Fill-Flash that automatically balances the output of the Nikon Speedlight and the scene's ambient light, thereby creating a better picture.

The Speedlight fires a series of monitor pre-flashes, which convey Information about the scene's lighting to the camera. The information is analyzed after combining the information from the camera’s 3D matrix metering system. The flash output is then adjusted to balance the ambient light in the scene.

It sounds complicated, but the truth is everything happens in just a fraction of a second right before each exposure. The performance and flash precision is phenomenal due to the Speedlight technology. The Speedlights provide improve color accuracy in flash photography, due to the flash color information communication found in the Nikon Coolpix digital cameras.

3D-RGB Matrix Metering II

This particular feature determines brightness, contract, and color. The data from 30,000 scenes can be stored inside the camera’s database, with algorithms that are continually added. The type of lighting; whether tungsten or fluorescent is also detectable with this technology. The 3D color matrix metering II evaluates the algorithms and calculates the appropriate exposure.