Hope your 2008 is going well and you’re having fun with all those photo-goodies you got for Christmas!

Amy, over at “Shooting the Kids” wrote a blog (click here) sharing her new Nikon SB-600 flash and was anxious to start getting to know it.

I can’t blame her! As part of Nikon’s fantastic Creative Lighting System (CLS), the SB-600 Speedlight, along with the SB-800 Speedlights and SU-800 Commander take creative flash photography where it’s never gone before (not that you need to own all of these, they’re just members of the CLS system).

Straight out of the box the SB-600 gives you sublime lighting control through Nikon’s i-TTL metering. Beyond that, when you get there, it can be used wirelessly and off-camera to deliver an great array of lighting solutions.

The first thing I’d recommend is to read up on the basics of getting going with your SB-600 (a quick-start guide) and just play away with it until you feel you’ve hit a creative wall with it. Rechargeable-batteries will help to minimize your AA-battery investment.

Then you can start exploring the other features of the CLS, the primary one being the IR/Wireless capability.

One site I heartily recommend is “Strobist”. David Hobby, the photojournalist who writes the blog not only knows on-camera lighting (or as he says “off-camera lighting”) but he knows how to communicate it to the rest of us (unlike the Nikon Speedlight manuals).

This site is a must-read for anyone wanting to get the most out of their Speedlight system (it’s not Nikon-only either).

Start at his “lighting 101″ post and work your way up (or around ) from there. Majorly good info.

Another good source for lighting info (although not a “strobe” site per-se) is David Tejada’s site “the F-Stops here”.

David is a Commercial-photographer who has no qualms about showing you how he works. His down to earth style makes it easy to pick up great Strobe-Secrets and learn a lot about lighting on location (not a lot of difference if you’re in a 10×8 foot boardroom or in a living-room chasing a 3-year old….good lighting is good lighting).

Next is the DVD put out by Nikon called: “The Speed of Light”.

This DVD, featuring the StobeMeister Joe McNally, shows you how versatile and powerful the Nikon CLS system really is. This isn’t a step-by-step tutorial on how to program your Speedlight, but more of a highly-charged exposé on what these lights are capable of doing.

Some might say this is nothing more than a Nikon advertisement, but for me it fired up my imagination as to what’s possible with these speedlights. I keep going back and watching it as I get more and more acclimated to my Speedlights.

Lastly, for those who find the Nikon Speedlight manual a little difficult to digest (and I’ve heard there’s more than a few of you out there), there’s the Magic Lantern Guide to Nikon AF Speedlights, Master the Creative Lighting System (click here).

This is a decent reference to the Nikon SB-Speedlights and can make finding what you’re looking for a little easier than the Nikon manual that comes with your flash. There are also a few tidbits in this book that aren’t in the Nikon manual (or can’t be found).

It looks like a newer version is slated to come out in June of this year (maybe for the SB-400?), but this could be worth looking into.

Well, that’s about it for now. As always, if you have any questions about the CLS or Digital-photography, feel free to ask in the comments!