Originally posted by MSL But as getting the Metz to work reliably is proving to be harder than I had hoped, and it does not have the most intuitive menus, I may end up selling it at some point. All the problems being discussed here and in other threads on the lack of reliable metering with the flash and the need to treat bounce and non-bounce situations differently makes it a less useful tool than I would like.
In the days of film, it was hard to know whether you were getting good exposure until you got your film back from the lab, but now with LCDs, it's really quite simple. Shoot in manual, review your shot, and if you don't like something, fix it. Is your subject too "hot"? Reduce the flash power. Is the background too dark? Slow the shutter speed. Both subject and background too dark? Open the aperture or boost the ISO. It works for direct flash, bounced flash or shooting through diffusion material like a softbox. Manual flash is my mode of choice, unless I don't think I'm going to have time to calculate the correct power, then I use Auto mode on the flash. The only time I use pTTL is when I need to do High Speed Sync, and that's only because I have no choice.
I do agree that the soft menu of the Metz isn't as straightforward as a dial on other flashes, but I think the trick to it is not to get bogged down reading the manual. Once you learn the underlying organization principle you'll never need to refer to the manual again. Parameters are under "Para", that's anything with a number, power level, ISO, aperture, focal length, and flash EV comp. "Mode" is for the type of control you want: TTL, pTTL, Auto, Manual, Strobe and Spotbeam. And "Sel", which I guess means select, has all the special functions like the modeling light, the secondary reflector, rear cutrain sync, wireless slave mode etc.