If your family gathering includes fairly young children, consider photographing them first.  Start with individual shots and let them move around and offer suggestions.  Take a few images of them in action—looking at flowers, sitting on a bench or petting the family dog—and show them what you’ve done so far.  When they see the results, kids are likely to be more cooperative throughout the rest of the photo session.

The aperture controls the amount of light produced by the flash.
The shutter speed controls the amount of light produced by the ambient light.

photomatix pro 4.1 $99

So I am always going to get better reception if I couple the antennae on my remotes by pointing my receivers and transmitter straight up.

If want to check focus, you need to take a few extra steps.  Just turning on the LCD and glancing at it won’t cut it.  The small screen makes everything look more in focus because it can’t show you all the pixels at once.  The reduced image size creates the illusion of a sharper image.

The correct form of copyright notice requires three elements:

The symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word “Copyright,” or the abbreviation “Copr.”
The year of first publication of the work.
The name of the author.
The standard form is: © 2012 Joe Smith.

The copyright notice should be legible and placed on a photo, so it can be reasonably noticed.

It’s a good idea to place a copyright notice on all of your photos, regardless of whether they are published or distributed in some other manner. The common form for an unpublished photo is: Unpublished work © 2012 Joe Smith.

And, well, I will not discuss the relatively obvious conclusion to the article: people like to post-process their images or apply optical effects. They always did. We do post-process our images in our brain, as the human vision is a pretty sophisticated optical system that still cannot be matched by anything artificial in many areas. So, definitely, if we post-process stuff all the time, we want to play around with inputs.

It seems to me that photography is going through a similar process that many artforms went through. Painting started off representational and later became impressionist. Picasso is reputed to have said something like the following
"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”

People want impressions that concur with what they want to remember, not extreme accuracy. Problem is that most people are not Monet or Picasso and this is where computers come in.
In the best photos, irrelevant detail is not present, just as in real life.. where we just don't see it.

60mm ISO 400 1/500
f/2.8

long posts, havent read in full

very long post, havent read in full

5 AA batteries at 45° angle to the lens

short distance = power & speed

does not address travel flash setups

..places, wildlife, and people that make our travels memorable, evoking a sense of delight or discovery—or both.

If it's poorly assembled now, it's not going to be better after a year of use.

They fail to read the manual.

They fail to study the masters.

use NR for long exposure

Camera Nikon D700
Exposure 20
Aperture f/8.0
Focal Length 24 mm
ISO Speed 200
Exposure Bias 0 EV

when stopping action is not the goal, and a really high shutter speed is not required, then FP Sync can be very useful. In fact, Auto FP is excellent for shooting portraits in bright daylight. Then, you can use a shutter speed well above the normal sync of 1/250th coupled with a wide aperture to blur the background which greatly helps isolate the subject. I typically use camera A mode, ISO 100, FP Sync, f/ 2.8 and 1/1000th in bright shade, and I get a flash range of about 10-15 feet. If I am in really bright light, like on the beach, the shutter has to be around 1/1600th, and this reduces the range to about 8-10 feet which is still reasonable for portraits.

If a greater distance than 10 feet is needed in bright daylight, there is no choice except to use regular flash sync and accept the requisite smaller aperture. This happens frequently when shooting a party outdoors, where I typically shoot in camera S mode, regular flash sync, ISO 100, 1/250th, and f/7, and I get acceptable fill out to 20 to 30 feet or so.

So the camera shutter speed is not very important if the flash is the main light.
Now, if you are going to try to balance the flash with some ambient light, then the shutter speed in the camera will be important to freeze whatever is being lit by ambient light (background, other people, etc.)

Firstly, we can set shutter speed and flash duration speed separately?
Flash duration is dependent on the flash output power. You don't control it directly (unless you are in manual flash mode), but it is independent from the camera shutter speed.
When there isn't much ambient light and aperture is set to very small, flash duration speed will freeze the moving object.
Basically correct.
When there is strong ambient light, shutter speed freeze the object.
Basically correct. In strong ambient light, your flash acts as "fill light", so motion freeze must be done by camera shutter speed.
When handheld your camera, shutter speed minimise handshake.
The general rule-of-thumb is that you need at least "1/focal-length" shutter speed to counter hand shake. But be aware that this is 35mm-equivalent focal length, so in your D90 ( it's a DX format camera, 1.5x crop) a 50mm lens will be 75mm-equivalent, so you'll need 1/80 shutter speed.
Some people can handhold slower than that, some need higher, depends on how steady you are.

I'm assuming on an insect you're not that concerned with fill light, and that the flash is going to be your key light. In other words, the flash will be your main source of light in these photos.
As a previous poster said, the flash itself is 1/xxxxx of a second, so it will freeze any motion out there. So, your insect will be frozen in time even if the shutter speed was at 1/30.... provided that there isn't enough ambient light to impact the image.
So.. really all you need to do is make your shutter speed / aperture combination tight enough that it reduces the ambient light such that it no longer impacts the photo.
Not sure if this is the look that you're going for, but if you look at just about any stop-action photos you'll notice that all of the light is coming from the flash(es) making the shutter speed much less critical.
The low sync speed really only becomes an issue when you're trying to balance flash with ambient light.

and you will see the recommended f-stop for your shutter speed. Now, go to aperture preferred and set it to higher number (smaller opening). Say the meter says f8 then set the camera to f16. Ambient light illumination will now be two stops darker. Then, use the flash and it will illuminate the closeup subject at the f16 level.
Here is one I took this morning (speg straight from the camera. The leaves were all evenly illuminated by an overcast sky but, those in the background are darker because they were not flash illuminated.

cable release

To make sure you’re getting the real thing, always purchase your memory cards from reputable dealers.

the worst thing you can do is to stop shooting.

Think Tank Retrospective 5 Shoulder Bag - Black USD 129

1. Choose File > Automate > Merge to HDR Pro.
2. Within the Merge to HDR dialog box, click Browse to navigate to the source images. In the folder, Shift-click the images to select the ones you need. Check the box to Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images then click OK.
3. After a short time, a second Merge to HDR dialog box opens. You’ll see thumbnails for each of the images used as well as a resulting image.
4. From the Preset list choose Photorealistic High Contrast to get a punchier image.
The Image on the left exhibits ghosting caused by slight movement between exposures. Checking the Remove ghosts box compensates for variables like wind.
5. Click the Remove ghosts box to remove the trailing image details caused by wind blowing items in the scene
6. Adjust the exposure and contrast to taste:
For this image, the settings used were Exposure: -1.0 | Shadow: 50% | Highlight -80%
7. Try boosting the Saturation around 30% for richer colors.
8. Click OK to create a new HDR image.

find a wide range of gray

Here's where an extra couple of steps will further aid in keeping the sensor clean. I've just removed a lens but before I put the cap on it I'm going to give the back element of the lens AND the protective lens cap a quick cleaning with my rocket blower. These extra steps help keep me from transferring dust from a dirty lens to the sensor in future lens changes!

use continuous focus (AI servo) and back button focus

The flash was a Canon 580 EX II with a 14″ Lumodi Beauty Dish mounted on it about 3′ away from the subject.

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” -Robert Capa

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

With the 5D, my rule of thumb was that up to ISO 800 I always used the same workflow regardless of the ISO. ACR for RAW conversion, working mostly in Lab, local contrast, CMYK shadows/highlights, selective sharpening on Luma channel in Lab, e.t.c. At ISO 1600 I had to be more careful and tone down the sharpening not to increase noise, and at ISO3200 I had to be a lot more careful. If I was very, VERY careful, with selective noise reduction and very careful selective sharpening, for some good light (but still low light) shots, I was able to get excellent ISO 6400 (ISO 1600 pushed 2 stops) with the 5D.

With the D3 the situation is better, by a stop or more. I feel like I can take an ISO3200 shot and apply my regular workflow and it still comes out looking great (no noise reduction at all). I took some ISO 6400 self-portraits and with no noise reduction and a toned-down workflow (sort of what I was doing before with ISO 1600 shots with 5D) they came out looking great. Only at ISO12800 I have to do the very careful post processing to get a good looking image. ISO12800 (ISO1600 pushed 3 stops) is pretty much useless on the 5D. The main difference is the color accuracy and color noise, high ISO shots with D3 still look great, with accurate colors and no annoying blotchy color noise. Now I can say that I am VERY impressed.

Are you going to be shooting in near-dark conditions without an AF illuminator on a regular basis?

recommended: gitzo, manfrotto, induro

you'll want the foreground to be in extremely sharp focus.

DOF Master app for iphone.

I have also had cards fail when the tiny metal connectors became corroded from the humidity in Southwest Florida, USA.

Humidity kills memory cards. And brand new cards have a slightly higher failure rate.

Uninstalling

Launch the "Terminal" application from the Applications Utilities folder.
Type "open /usr/bin" (without the quotes) in the Terminal window, then press RETURN. (This opens a folder that you normally can't access from OS X.)
Drag "exiftool" and "lib" into the trash from the "bin" folder you opened. You should first confirm that "lib" contains only two sub-folders: "File" and "Image". If it contains anything else, don't trash it because you have the wrong "lib" folder.

google keywords : autofocus micro-adjustment

And stop looking at 100% images on your monitor: not only will it make you go blind, 50% screen resolution is more resolution than your printer can reproduce anyway.

$94.50 50% discount

f6.3

Here's a cleaning tip I learned years ago and assumed everybody else already knew, but apparently it's no longer a matter of common knowledge: before you use the brush, blow air through it a few times, using the blower (in the direction of the bristles, so as not to fray them). This puts a small static charge on the bristles themselves, and after doing this they will lift dust off the lens very easily, without any real effort and without just moving them around on its surface.

Only after dust is blown and then brushed off the lens, and only if necessary, should you use a wet cleaner and cleaning tissue on the lens: cleaning is the single most common cause of lens damage. Even then, most people recommend that a microfiber cloth should NOT be used to clean the glass area of a lens. The cloth is nice for cleaning the lens body and other camera gear, but because it traps dust each time it's used, it shouldn't be rubbed on the lens surface itself. The only thing most experts recommend for safe cleaning of the lens itself is lens tissue designed for the task: a fresh piece every time guarantees that you will not be grinding your cloth's supply of old dust back into the lens' coating when you clean it. The lens tissue itself will leave a little residue, but that's not a problem: just blow it away with the blower, and you're done.

so-so

not very nice, but perspective