Could Do With Some Advice Please

Keith W

Keith W

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I will be going to a Christmas party tonight (Saturday) and I am hoping to take some pictures during the evening.

This is my set up:

Sony a200
Sony 18-70mm F3.5-5.6
Cheap Metz flash

Now the hall the party will be held in has terrible lighting and all the pictures I have taken there, with flash, have been on the dark side.

Can someone please give me some tips/advice on taking better/brighter pictures in those conditions.

I have not really ventured much outside of auto mode so would prefer to stick to that until I am more confident.

Would it be possible to achieve a brighter image using exposure control?

Thanks in advance.

Take care, Keith
 
If the hall has a white ceiling of normal height, point the flash straight up and use a bounce-card as shown here www.abetterbouncecard.com You will get great light - soft light from the ceiling, and a nice drop of fill-in from the card which lightens faces and puts a sparkle in the eye. Just use an index card and a rubber band.

Auto exposure metering should be fine, although bouncing the flash like this uses a lot of power (use fresh batteries) so you might need to increase the ISO a bit and/or use a lower f/number.

If the images are a bit dark, there must be some facility to adjust the exposure accordingly. Which flash gun is it? If it is an older type gun with an external sensor, you usually set these up by matching the f/number to some kind of colour coding on the gun, in which case if it says set f/5.6, then set f/4 instead and you'll get one stop brighter.

If there is not a suitable ceiling to bounce off, use slow-sync flash - basically balancing the background ambient exposure with the flash. Set the camera to aperture priority and let it do its thing for the ambient exposure reading, then set the flash to match the f/number. Compensate as necessary as described above. The danger here is that is the ambient light is very low you'll get into silly long shutter speeds with background blur and ghosting. Use a high ISO and lowest f/number to minimise that.
 
HoppyUK said:
If there is not a suitable ceiling to bounce off, use slow-sync flash - basically balancing the background ambient exposure with the flash. Set the camera to aperture priority and let it do its thing for the ambient exposure reading, then set the flash to match the f/number. Compensate as necessary as described above. The danger here is that is the ambient light is very low you'll get into silly long shutter speeds with background blur and ghosting. Use a high ISO and lowest f/number to minimise that.
Click to expand...

Another variation on this might be to switch to manual mode and set up so that you get a long-ish exposure that renders the background and lighting satisfactorily and use the flash to light your subjects. This works well if the subjects are almost completely backlit, preferably by the disco lighting, as the flash will freeze their motion, but leave a motion-blurred background.

I found that when the strobe lights are going, AF goes AWOL, so take the opportunity to have a drink.
 
Turn the wick up (iso) to the best v's noise and you will make the most of what your flash can produce....
 
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