How to preserve low ambient light when shooting musicians in bars?

[gs.davies]

Last night some good friends of mine asked me to cover a show they were doing at a bar with a view to using some of the shots as promotionals on their website.

The lighting conditions were very poor - all shots here are SOOC. This one shows the area they were performing in and it needed .5 sec at f1.8 ISO100 for a proper exposure.



My gear consisted of a Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D), 50/1.8, the kit 18/55 and a cheap Sigma 55/200. The zooms are not fast. I also have a Jessops 360AFD flash and a shower cap type diffuser. I had no way of getting the flash off camera.

The maths told me that the correct exposure should be around 1/15 or less at ISO1600 to get half a chance of seeing the performers against the backlighting, making handheld shooting with available light difficult - I tried some tripod shots but their performance was less than static, so there was too much motion blur for my liking.

I had no choice but to resort to flash. I tried all I knew to preserve the ambience given by the lighting in the bar, but even on manual mode at it's lowest power (1/16th - the flash is GN36 ISO100) I was blowing out the soft lighting. 55mm Sigma - 1/60 f5.0 ISO400



Here's an available light shot 1/15 f1.8 ISO1600, again SOOC



My questions are:

-Should I just write these sorts of lighting conditions off as a bad job?
-Is the flash too powerful for the purpose I was trying to use it?
-How can I preserve a lighting scene like that and still adequately illuminate the performers for a shutter speed of around 1/60th to preserve motion?
-Apart from presenting them some of these shots in B&W, what can I do in PP to fix?

Many thanks in advance for your replies,
Gary

[dandellion]

Skip the on-camera flash by any means. That thing is not good for anything.
Even the noise of ISO1600 is better than harsh front light made by the flash. After all, you can reduce noise in PP, but nothing can fix the bad lighting.

If the first image was done with .5sec with ISO100 then it could be done with 1/30 with ISO1600. You'd still end up with some motion blur but you could go with 1/60 and push the exposure a bit in PP (shoot RAW).

Second image is too bright. If you're shooting scene from a bar, dark image is quite ok, actually, it's preferred that way.

Third image has a problem with white balance. Providing that there was some light from side, I'd go for even darker, let some portions be underexposed and get nice contrast on the faces.

[wulf]

Use a tripod, or at least something to support the camera. You can then get away with a slower shutter speed. A bit of motion blur on the performer doesn't hurt and can actually be a useful effect.

If, like a lot of small gigs, the performers are backlit, then you do end up having to make compromises. Fortunately (and probably because of the difficulties) music photography tends to be forgiving of technical deficencies as long as your pictures have soul! Also, don't shy away from the possibililities of developing your picture in your digital darkroom.

Wulf

[gs.davies]

Thanks for the comments - I guess the lesson I have to learn is how to balance the flash against the ambient light. In the second shot, the exposure is better but the flash has killed off most of the ambience, the bottom one for me is still too dark.

I really suspect that there wasn't much else I could have done in this situation and I've covered all the angles suggested so far in the 400+ shots I got. Some were tripod long exposures, no flash, some were tripod long exposure with second curtain synch to freeze motion at the end (actually some of those at 18mm of people dancing are quite cool!), loads of ambient light shots at ISO1600 1/15 f1.8. I've pulled up the exposure three stops in some I've processed so far and in B&W they look good, especially when burning some of the background. I just have an aversion to my camera's treatment of ISO1600, it's intrusively noisy and Lightroom struggles to tame it to my satisfaction. I've also cranked up the colour temperature on some and that adds a bit of warmth back to the colour images.

The only other cheap solution at the time which I regret not following up was gelling the flash with an orange filter as that may have helped warm up some of the flash shots. Luckily, they do this gig every couple of weeks and are happy for me to come along and shoot any time, so this is great low light practise.

At the top of my shopping list now is: A lightmeter that can do flash, a wireless trigger kit, a Vivitar 285 and some gels and other modifiers/accessories and I'll be following the Strobist 101 lessons...

Finally, I saw a great signature on a forum somewhere which sums this experience up:

Shoot with what you've got, not with what you wish you had..

[reyjinn]

You'll find your answers when going through lighting 101 or 102 on strobist. What you could do to reduce the power of your flash is closing the aperture. It would have reduced your ambient as well but you would probably be able to find a balance there. Also bouncing the flash of the ceiling (if white or close) rather than having it go straight in their faces. If your flash bends its head that is.

[zona5101]

Originally Posted by reyjinn

You'll find your answers when going through lighting 101 or 102 on strobist. What you could do to reduce the power of your flash is closing the aperture. It would have reduced your ambient as well but you would probably be able to find a balance there. Also bouncing the flash of the ceiling (if white or close) rather than having it go straight in their faces. If your flash bends its head that is.

this is good advice. try bouncing & controling your fstop before going off camera or buying new gear.

stroll through planet neill:

http://neilvn.com/tangents/flash-pho...ouncing-flash/

[gs.davies]

Thanks for all the advice and help people!

The flash can do bounce and swivel and I was using a 'shower cap' type diffuser on it. The ceiling was very low and I probably could have used to pull out card in the flash to soften the effect of it bouncing off the ceiling. I review, I think something directional, like a honeycomb maybe, might have been useful here.

I've spent (more) time reading Strobist again, and even more time practising with the techniques people are suggesting here. The good news is that this is another mistake I hopefully won't be repeating!

My blog now details my learnings. I am very keen on getting to grips with flash though, both on and off camera - it seems like there's a whole new world to explore where strange and magical things happen. The relationship between shutter/aperture and ISO seems to work in ways that make a lot of sense - at the moment, it seems to me that ISO is the control for DOF in a flash arrangement, where shallower DOF requires a lower ISO, if the aperture is mainly controlling how much of that burst of light hits the film/sensor given a set amount of light that comes from the flash.

After a bit of messing around in Lightroom, i've got to a point where I'm OK-ish with the images. I've asked to go back and have another go, in the hope I can get crisper, sharper images with less noise and focus errors and which need less coaxing into being half-way acceptable in LR..

Here's the images.

MobileMe Gallery

My blog and my summary of learnings so far

Gary Davies' Blog