Need advice shooting portraits at night...

[ltilley]

Some friends and I are going to a WaterFire show (they light the river in Providence on fire)... and I'd like to take some pictures of my friends with the WaterFire in the background.

I have a feeling this is where the whole slow flash sync thing comes into play, but I'm not sure exactly how it works.

I will have a tripod, I have a digital rebel... and I can either use the on camera flash or my 500EX.

I did some searching on the web... but I'm not finding anything that explains what I should be doing.

I guess I'm looking for a simialr affect as taking a night skyline shot with people in the foreground..

Any help is GREATLY appreciated! (and sample pics are welcome too!)

Lisa

[freygr]

Use a manual flash, and set your F stop for the flash distance, then manually triger the flash. This will expose the people and the forground and not expose the background. As you will find the night time exposures are going to be very long.

[ltilley]

Hmmm, okay.. I want to make sure I understand... because I do want to expose for the background, right...

Should I expose for the bacground and then set my flash to manual and use my distance and f-stop?

Now here's a silly question I'm sure. I'm not familiar with manually triggering my flash. How do I do this, and how do I time it right? THANKS AGAIN!

Lisa