Clubs/Bars photography

[albiwan]

I wanna take some pictures in a Club here in Vegas but how do I achieve a nice effect? If i use the flash everything get bright except for the dark background. I actually wanna keep the color of the lights to keep the atmosphere but I'd like to capture the people in the right way...so they are not blurry or shaky. If i keep a long exposure than everything looks blurry but I have the colors I need. Do I have to set the flash as "rear". I have a nikon D50 and a SB600. Please help

[caseycroucher]

i dont know what you shoot but i think that RAW will be great for that situation. But also, dont be afraid to tweak the photo alittle in Lightroom or P/S

[albiwan]

the thing is not about the photo format but how to use the flash or the exposure to achieve an picture that almost look like the real life.

[Nicole]

I don't have an additional flash so I can't answer your question on how to set your flash, although some of what I've read has suggested bouncing the flash off the ceiling. But... have you tried increasing the ISO and using a large aperture? I'm not sure that your current lenses will open up quite wide enough, but if you were really interested in doing this sort of photography often, you may consider picking up a lens with a maximum aperture of f/1.4 or f/1.8 depending on your budget. Hopefully you get someone who can answer your flash questions though :)

[kunaldaswani]

Low aperture + High ISO. I have been shooting epople at clubs. Thank god for my 500mm f1.8

Examples:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kunaldaswani/785672688/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1238/785672688_c8d7148c50.jpg" width="500" height="339" alt="Sam" /></a>

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kunaldaswani/535778866/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/239/535778866_f1a5ba5337.jpg" width="333" height="500" alt="DJEric" /></a>

[Saralonde]

Low aperture + High ISO. I have been shooting epople at clubs. Thank god for my 500mm f1.8

You have a 500 f1.8 :eek:;)!

[Digidave]

You have a 500 f1.8

Just think of the size of that thing!:eek::D

[kevinv033]

albiwan: You have a fairly difficult situation. Hopefully, I can help you out a little. If I were to shoot in that situation and wanted to keep the environmental feeling, I would use my flash to just punch up the ambient exposure rather than be the main exposure.

You're probably going to have to shoot at ambient or close to it to keep the feeling of being in the club. That means dragging the shutter (lower shutter speeds) and high ISO—just try to be very very steady with your hand holding. With the ambient exposure in place, I would then adjust my flash exposure to just open up the shadows a tad. I would not use direct flash, I would bounce from the sides, ceiling, people, whatever is nearby that you can bounce from. You may have to experiment with flash exposure compensation to see what is working for you in that situation...not sure how you do that on Nikon (since I am a Canon guy). I know that Nikon has a much more advanced flash system than Canon, so you may not have to do much but meter for the ambient and bounce the flash to bump up the exposure a tad.

You may get a little motion blur. If the motion is too much for your tastes, I would probably up the flash power a bit and get a faster shutter speed, but then the background could get dark.

Hope that helps a little...

[smc1377]

A little late in the reply, but one option is to take a longer exposure with 2nd curtain sync on the flash.

Meaning, you can take like a 1 second exposure so that you capture all the ambient light and mood, then just as the 2nd curtain is about to close (at the end of the 1 second exposure), your flash will fire and fully illuminate your subject.

Here, check out these photos at flickr tagged "2nd curtain"...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/2ndcurtain/interesting/