Thanks to some great help here, largely from Merco_61, I settled on a new DSLR to replace my 11-year-old D70. I decided to lash out a little and got a D7200 along with an 18-300 3.5-6.3 superzoom to serve as my "walking around" lens.
Next week I'll be going to a multi-day event where I expect to be taking a lot of outdoor pictures of people and vehicles with this new camera and lens. I find at events like this that natural light is often not optimal due to shadows, strong backlight, etc. I therefore like to bring a strobe to get some fill flash. I'll be moving around quickly, though, so I can't spend significant time dialing things in. I'd like to leave the camera on automatic settings as much as possible, just dial the focal length to frame the shot, then use a strobe to get some fill.
I've found in the past that I do better with one of my strobes (I have an SB-800 and SB-600) detached from the camera and held out to one side. I have an SC-29 with coiled cable to connect the strobe to the camera's hotshoe. Alternatively, I also have an SU-800 commander, but everything being equal I'd rather stick with the SC-29 so as not to overcomplicate things.
In the past when I've used this on my D70, I've sometimes run into issues (mostly related to the fact that I forgot the settings I previously used). Two problems seemed to occur. First, the strobe sometimes would refuse to fire because the camera thought it had sufficient light for the shot (I thought I'd set it to mandatory flash, but my memory may not be great). Second, I recall that the camera often wanted to pop up its built-in flash even when the SC-29 is connected to the shoe.
So here's my question. If I'm using the D7200 and 18-300 3.5-6.3 lens with an SB-600 or SB-800 connected via SC-29, what are the best settings to keep everything as automatic as possible but be able to get some fill-in flash during daylight conditions? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.