How to shoot birthdays (dark)

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Carlm90

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Carl
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Hi all, I'm going to be helping out a family member at their 21st and offered to take some photographs for them for free. I'm confident but am worried that I will have some settings wrong. Would my 50mm 1.8 be a good choice of lens and what would you set your camera up like? Bare in mind I'm not the only one taking photographs. I'm using it as a learning curves and will show you the results after :lol:
 
This is all depending on what you want to achieve........ BUT...

My thoughts would be to use Flash - Ideally a speedlight.. Or similar...

As it's Dark, use the manual setting and predetermine your Aperture/shutter/ISO......

Bounce the flash where possible.......... and let the system sort it's self out.....

Take a few test shots to see what settings are working.....
 
I would use flash and a standard range zoom. If there's a nromal height white ceiling, use bounce-fill with the flash straight up for the bounce part, and a bounce-card for the fill-in bit. Like this www.abetterbouncecard.com Many flash guns have a bounce card built in (including the Jessops ones ;) ) or a Stofen style diffuser works the same way.

If there's enough light without flash, 50 1.8 is about as good as it gets without spending loads, but be careful when shooting more than one person. Depth of field is so shallow at f/1.8 that it's very hard to get more than one person in focus - line them up carefully!
 
Ok thanks for your tips and advice. I will shoot with my standard kit lens I think and see about borrowing a flash maybe ;) I will see how the light is and maybe try some test nights in a pub before hand to see what my results will be like.
 
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