Skies
So I was at a park today and found a really nice scenic overlook spot. So I took a shot:
Whoa... the trees look ok but the sky is blown out. In this case, the camera was light metering on the trees. Let see what happens when I get my light metering from the sky:
Well now the sky is exposed well, but the trees are dark. I want the trees from the first shot and the sky from the second shot. There is a way to do this without photoshopping the two pictures together. A graduated neutral density (ND) filter. It just so happens that I had one, thanks to one of my photography friends.
This filter shades the sky, while allowing the land to expose normally. Lets is what we get:
Nice! (Yes, I change locations and zoomed out, hence the linear distortion and vignetting)
Add a little saturation in post processing, because harsh sunlight sucks the color out of everything:
Worthy of desktop background status 
Flash Gels
So one of the hard parts of flash photography is trying to get the lighting to look natural. This is particularly true when there are other light sources that are not the same color as your flash's light.
Here is an example:
This is without the flash. The scene is only lit by an incandescent light in the lamp. The white balance is set to flash. You can see that the light is very warm. Too warm.
Here I turned on my flash. So now we have the typical unnatural lighting situation. It very obvious that a flash was used because of the color difference between the incandescent and flash lights. What we need to do is to make the two lights the same color.
The first thing I do is white balance to the incandescent light. YIKES! Now the light from the lamp is white and the flash light is VERY cool. Now to warm up the flash. This is where gels come in.
I have covered the flash with a Change to Orange (CTO) gel. Now the flash and incandescent light should be closer to the same color.
Ahh! Success! This picture looks naturally lit because the flash and ambient light are matched.
I got my gels from photogels.com for $10.25 ($6 + $4.25) shipping.
Lightening
A great storm came through the other night. I've been wanting to get a good shot of the spider lightening that central Texas weather has to offer, so I took my (metal) tripod out to my back porch and decided to give it a try.
There are a few basic rules when shooting lightening:
1) Manual focus. There is very little light coming from the sky and nothing for the camera to focus on. You need to set your lens for manual focus and roll it out to infinity.
2) Long exposure time. I used 10 seconds.
3) Aperture. Basically you want it wide enough to expose the lightening properly, but small enough to allow for a long exposure. I used f/8.
4) ISO. Go as low as you can, usually ISO 100.
5) Zoom all the way out so you can get as much of the sky as possible. You don't know where the bolt will come from so watch for a little while, figure out where most of them are coming from, then point your camera in that direction.
I live in a "house farm" neighborhood, which means lots of street lights. I dropped my tripod down low enough to use the fence to block the street lights. Some of the light is still reflected off of the houses, but not enough to mess up the shot.
On the Canon XSi, there a "continuous shot" timer mode. It will take up to 10 pictures in sequence at the end of a 10 second timer. This is what I used. I pushed the shutter button once and the camera took 10 pictures at 10 seconds apiece (100 seconds to complete the sequence). If you don't have this feature (or something like it) on your camera then just keep shooting. Lightening KNOWS when you shutter is closed, so keep it open as much as possible
I took about 60 pictures and got 3 with lightening in them so... you have to take a lot depending on the lightening frequency.
Do NOT do this out in the open as your camera and tripod make a good lightening rod. Be safe!
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