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If you're shooting "Art" as opposed to snapshots, then you can could (and should) skip the on-camera flash.

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ORIGINAL: phoenixinchains
attention pale people; don't take nude shots in bright sun light. Trust me. i love my milky skin, even my freckled shoulders, goes well with the red hair. tried a picture like this, and well, i just looked like a ghost lost in the world of the living... the squinting eyes didn't help either.

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ORIGINAL: ThunderRoad
Generally, when I was still using a point and shoot, I would shoot in color and convert in software if I wanted B&W.  I prefer color, but I want really VIVID color, almost sureal. 

1. I purchased some inexpensive black sheets to hang up as backdrops.  The girls promptly tore them down in all their attentions on each other, so many of the shots have crappy backgrounds, including the awful wood paneling in the office/playroom where we shot.  Next time I'll have to secure them better, and tie up the girls to keep them from rolling around so much :).  Also, twin-sized sheets (which were on sale for $2) aren't really big enough, so either I need to pin/sew them toghether or look at getting bigger ones.  On the plus side, the shots where the black sheet is in view really look great.
2. I had an awful awful orange tone on everything.  Nothing I fiddled with on the camera would make it go away.  I thought it was the warming filter (812) I had on, but taking it off resulted in the same tones.  I thought it was just bad lighting, but that seemed odd as nothing seemed at all orange normally.  When I did some really good closeups with a lot of lighting/flash, then the orange disappeared, but otherwise it tinted everything.  I FINALLY figured out what the problem was last night - I had a white-balance setting skewed way off deep in some menu on the camera.  The next shoot will be more representative.
3. On the plus side, if I convert the pics to B&W, the orange tint is irrelevant and it looks great!
4. I might be able to remove the orange in post, but it does make the skintones pretty white/pale, and I dont' have the patience for endless fiddling in photoshop (yet), but I hopefully can do some things with some auto settings.
   
5. I have the18-55 kit lens and a 55-200 second lens.  I shot most everything with the 55-200, but it doesn't really work well in the close quarters of an intimate shoot and home office, because the minimum focus distance is a couple feet at least.  It has a great flexability to go from wide to tight in an instant, but getting close in there doesn't work well.  The 18-55 is completely the opposite, I can get fairly close physically, but couldn't pull back well and the depth of field wasn't great either.  There is an 18-200 available (around $600) that could be a great one-lens solution for this kind of shoot to provide the most flexability in an instant.
6. I did get an SB600 flash and a diffuser for it.  It helps a lot to fill in things.  I kept the flash tilted at a 45-degree angle to the camera lens for the duration, and kept the diffuser on it the whole time as well.
   
7. I got a copy of Adobe Lightroom to play with as a workflow manager.  In my first attempts I found it very useful.  To fully take advantage of it, I'm going to start shooting in RAW instead of HQ JPG from now on.
8. Manual focusing will just not work for me.  When I did find focus, the results were blurry because of my bad eye.  Using the focus indicator didn't help much because often the action was just too rapid for me to get it zeroed in time.  I had to go back to AF.  If I want to get a fixed-length lens like recommended above, it will have to be one that will auto-focus.  That would likely require me to replace the D40 body with a different one or hope someone comes out with an AF-S lens that will fit.  I can get a D80 for around $700-$800, so that might be an option if I sell the D40.  That's a ways off right now.
9. I don't normally like B&W, however I found converting to greyscale results in pictures that are much more forgiving, or at least that I'm much more willing to forgive.  My goal is still to concentrate on color.
10. It was a blast!  And my girls had so much fun too; within moments they completely forgot I was there.  That was my hope - I really wanted this to be a much more candid shoot than a posed one.  I think it adds a lot more energy to it.