First "Freelance Job" need some advice

[evader]

A friend of mine is the editor for the local town newspaper (full colour paper) and has asked me if I'd be interested in helping with some photo's for the paper. I figured it's a good way to help me with my photography and would help him out at the same time.

First assignment is tomorrow night. It is the lighting of the Christmas lights at the park in town. He suggested pictures of the opening speaker as well as maybe the entertainment (local band) and of course a few pictures of big and brightly lit displays.

Second one is Saturday afternoon a small little town outside of ours is having a Country Christmas event geared towards childrens activities and that sort of thing. Pretty much free to take whatever pictures I want to.

Now, I don't have a lot of experience shooting at night and am looking for some tips on how to get the best shots possible. Any advice on camera settings for shooting at night time?
I'm shooting with a Nikon D60 with the kit lens and the 55-200mm lens.

I know this probably doesn't seem like a big deal to most of you guys/gals but this is the first time I've actually been asked to go and shoot something specific for a specific purpose other than my wife telling me to take more pictures my kids...so I'd like to do the best job possible. Any tips, hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Jim Bryant]

Maybe try using some ambient light and flash fill light. If you use the flash at full power you'll get the foreground exposed and the background dark. I always try shooting at 30th/15th/ of a second at f2.8 and flash set at about 1/16 power. That way you get just a little motion blur to suggest movement, but the slow shutter speed and flash output balances with the ambient light, so you get background and foreground, instead of a black background. Make sense? You might want to take some test shots at iso 400, 640 and 800 to get the right balance of lighting.