Beginner Advice on weekend shoot

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Richard
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I usually shoot sport but as it's the end of the rugby season I've been asked to take photos of the player of the year night. The light where I'll be taking the shots is not great but I do have a SB-700. I would be shooting roughly 5-10 feet away so probably looking at waist upwards with trophies in hand. The only "indoor" lens I have is the 35mm 1.8. Advice would be greatly appreciated as never done anything like this before and the flash is new to me also.
 
Try putting the camera in manual mode, aperture around f11, shutter speed 1/250th, ISO around 1000 and flash on TTL mode, facing upwards - you might want to turn down the flash power a little depending on the light and distance. I do a lot of posed presentations at awards nights, sounds very similar - I prefer a 24-70mm zoom but you'll be fine with the prime. I often think it would be nice to widen the aperture but with that kind of event it can be difficult to keep the presenter and recipient in the plane of focus
 
If you're shooting at f11, you might as well use the kit 18-55mm zoom lens.
If you're shooting with flash, there's no need to limit yourself to a 35mm prime. The prime with a wide aperture would be useful if you weren't using flash, but with flash, you can get away with just using the zoom which will give you more flexibility.

As pointed out, you don't want a shallow depth of field for this, so I would aim for f5.6 - f8 (I think f11 is overkill), this will give a reasonable depth of field to keep people in focus.
My reasoning is: the higher the f-stop, the more light the flash has to put out, this in turn means it takes longer to re-cycle ready for the next shot and it means your batteries will run down sooner.
As for the shutter speed; when you're talking about using a flash, it's a bit different. The flash of light freezes your movement, so you don't need fast shutter speeds. What shutter speed does do is control the amount of ambient light in the scene.
So if you want just the subject to be lit and the room to be darker, then have a fast shutter speed; if you want the subject lit and the room to be lighter, have a slower shutter speed.
Again, if you have a slower shutter speed, you won't need so much power from your flash, which will speed up the flash re-cycle time and improve battery life.

Also, you need to consider how far you are away from the stage/presentation area. You'll need to be close enough to get the shot as flash won't work as well from across the room.
I would go to the venue beforehand and practice with a friend on stage.
 
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