Lowlight without SLR

[bsolah]

I've taken a long unexpected break from doing a lot of photography over the past 6 months or so and only recently realised part of it was a frustration with being unable to taken decent and clear photos in low-light such as in pubs, at night, or at parties. Either it's too dark, of if I get close enough and use a flash, it's too washed out. This is where I've been needing to do most of my photography and since being unable to do so, have been leaving the camera at home.

I use an Olympus SP565-UZ, so it's not an SLR, but aside from playing with ISO, not really sure how to help me take decent photos in those kinds of settings.

[ddr]

have u tried using a tripod? 'cause even my SLR plus a good image stablization on my lens can't guarantee getting good pictures in dark places like a pub

from a rough google search, it seems your bridge camera has all the modes that an SLR has, including aperture or shutter priority, and manual modes. if you've put it at your largest aperture and highest iso and still getting non-hand-holdable shutter speeds, you can:

1) use a tripod
2a) get an external flash. i don't think your camera has a hotshoe, so you can try an optical slave attached to this external flash. your popup flash will trigger the optical slave, which in turn will trigger your external flash.
2b) get a small LED panel. try Z96 or yong-nuo ones
3) get a new camera

[dlambert]

Very generally, in order to do low-light photography (DSLR or not), you need sufficient light at the sensor. Your shutter speed & aperture combine to vary the amount of light physically hitting the sensor, and your ISO speed changes the sensitivity of the sensor such that high ISO settings allow you to take a photo with less light (at the cost of image noise).

In your case, really slow shutter speeds might not be much of an option -- you can stabilize the camera with a tripod, but if you're taking photos of people who are moving, you're still going to have blurry photos. I think your options boil down to two approaches:

Natural light -- use the widest aperture you can, and the longest shutter speed that doesn't result in blurry photos. Increase the ISO until you like the way the photo is exposed, or you're getting too much noise in your photos. Using a "bridge" camera, you might find that you just can't get the results you want this way, though.

Add light -- your flash is one obvious option, but there are others here, I believe. If you can increase the ambient light by using a lamp of some sort, that might help. You should also have several options as far as flash goes. If you're getting washed-out images with your flash, you might have to use some sort of exposure compensation to fix this. Your camera may also have a way to alter the amount of flash power it's using during a shot, so check on that. Finally, you can look at an external flash of some sort -- optically triggered in conjunction with the flash on your camera, or I thought I saw something that said your camera can trigger off-camera flashes wirelessly, which would be nice.

Good luck!

[inkista]

Low-light photography is typically the one thing that bridge cameras suck at. Sorry. As noted above, you've got three settings to control the exposure: ISO, aperture, and shutter speed.

Unfortunately, your Oly has a tiny 1/2.3" sensor (6.6mmx4.62mm). This generally limits the high ISO performance. More recent cameras from 2010 and later are showing better high iso performance (e.g., Canon Powershot S95), but these typically use slightly larger 1/1.7"-sized sensors, and do not have superzoom lenses on them.

So cranking up the ISO, unless you do some very aggressive noise reduction processing is probably not all you hope it to be. This is probably the #1 reason people move to cameras with larger sensors: to have higher ISO settings with less noise. Maybe an Olympus E-PL2 or a dSLR is what you're looking for.

For aperture, again, your camera limits you in two ways: you can't change the lens. And the lens that's built in is f/2.8-4.5. So, the only thing you can do here to maximize your shutter speed is to zoom OUT (not IN). You can only reach f/2.8 if you're at the wide end of the lens. At the telephoto end, your maximum aperture is f/4.5 (remember, smaller f-numbers => larger aperture openings).

And with shutter speed, you're also limited both by how much you're zooming, and by how fast your subjects are moving. If you're zoomed in at the end of your range (92mm; film equiv. of 520mm), your shutter speed probably needs to be above 1/200s just to counteract camera shake blur (depending on your handholding technique and if you have stabilization turned on). And subjects can move even faster. A tripod might help, but you'll still likely have motion blur if you have to use very slow shutter speeds to get a decent exposure.

You could zoom out, crank up the ISO, and try shooting that way. But this is probably far more limited than you'd like and not liable to make you happy. So, the only other choice then is adding flash. And if you don't like the dead-white straight-on flash look, then off-camera flash. And without a flash hotshoe, while it's possible, becomes a bit more of a PITA, and also means getting an external flash unit and lugging it about with you.

You may just have hit the limits of what the camera can do. As ddr says, maybe it's time to think about gettting a new camera.