Canon Speedlite 580EX II

I never use a flash, i have a chance to buy one of these at a decent price, im just wondering if it is too powerful for me to learn with thank you...Ray

I will tell you of an experience I had about 5 years ago.

Both I and my niece had the same Canon cameras. She had acquired hers because of the birth of her first child. I also had a good quality flash unit. After the baby was born, and ater several hundreds shots by both of us, she remarked that all my pictures were better and attributed it to my many years of being an amateur photographer. I didn’t say much, but did insist that she use my flash for a day. No pun intended, but she saw the light and immediately bought a flash unit.

If the price is decent, and your style of photography lends itself to a flash unit, get it and put it to good use.

Definitely not too powerful to learn with. It's still a great flash - I still use two of these professionally. Get it and try it, you can always sell it if it doesn't fit your needs.

Not at all and this is a nicely featured unit over the older 430 EX models. As some additional thoughts: the Canon RT system is quite nice and the 430EXIII RT can be bought used from $125-$160'ish range.

There is no such thing as a too powerful . You always can use less (or let the ETTL choose less), but you can not extract more. Additionally: Indirect use (bouncing) of flash 'wastes' a lot of light - but often produces more pleasing results then direct flash.

happyduck wrote in post #18875880
I never use a flash, i have a chance to buy one of these at a decent price, im just wondering if it is too powerful for me to learn with thank you...Ray

Nope. The prices on them are great, because of the newer -RT enabled gear, and it's a very capable flash, perfect for learning with. I'd recommend reading Neil van Niekerk's Tangents website for learning how to use it.

The only place where the 580EX II isn't as nice as the newer models is that it doesn't have built-in radio triggering, if you want to use it off-camera, Strobist-style. But it can be used off-camera over Canon's "smart" optical triggering system with the pop-up flash of a 60D/70D as the master. Optical slaving tends to lose range/reliability if used outside in bright sunlight, but indoors in studio conditions (and then you might want to move to radio triggering), but it's still a usable system.

But if you think you're going to want to do a lot of studio-style lighting, then maybe a Godox TT685-C, V860II-C, or V1-C is a better choice, because it's part of an entire lighting system.