Don't bother with soft box when you need all the juice you can get. Soft box is only good if you have a very powerful light source, and you need multiple of them since they concentrate the light source and get diffuse greatly by the box, in other words, you lose alot of juice at night with a puny flash and soft box.

Shooting at lighting condition like that with iso400 is laughable, iso400 is good for overcast day but at night, u need more juice...it's all about juice and artificial+ambient light. Really, don't hesitate to shoot at iso 1600, noise is NOT a problem with the D80, a little neat image + unsharp mask will get you VERY usable pictures.

Also take note of flash to subject distance, there's too much room behind the subjects, which explains why the background is so damn dark...you need more than 1 flash in situation like this. Or high iso + large aperture + flash.

Here's one I took 2 days ago in a Jazz festival down the street, it was at night, 10pm or so. To save u the hassles of checking the exif, it was taken at:

-1/80
-105mm (well, thank god he didnt move much)
-iso1600
-f2.8
-flash bounced 70 degree into the tent

Yup, softbox is good for macro and portrait if you have multiple flashes/hot light. I use strobes and umbrellas at home, but it'd probably be better to use softbox/umbrella with hot light if possible. Alot of people don't like to use soft box coz they are huge and take up lots of spaces. I'm not talking about portable softbox though.

This guy here in POTN (Pioti) did a freaking good job with just a 350d + lumiquest soft box + 60mm macro.
EDIT: forgot to post the link
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showth...t=142566&page=6

This post has been edited by AlamakLor: Jul 16 2007, 09:37 AM