balancing flash and ambient part 1

Today's Strobist lesson was on balancing flash and ambient. And using shutter speed to creatively control the background. I shot a variety of stuff with Lee and changed up my background. Fortunately this is a topic I'm familiar with and hopefully this will get me back into keeping up with the strobist blog. I've been reading, but haven't been shooting as much. I've been traveling a lot lately and need to get back into the swing of things. So here's part 1 ...