[peteedee]

This is a party i was Taking photos at. I had trouble freezing the action. Can someone with my camera or one like it tell me how i
can set the camera in the future?
Thanks.

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[hcc]

The shutter speed was /15 s and the aperture was f4.0. You need to use a larger aperture (f2 ot f1.4) with a faster shutter speed.

If you cannot use a faster lens, consider to use the on-board flash. While ti can be disrupting for the dancers, it would bring more light to the scene.

Hope that the comment can help.

[steephill]

The simple fix is to use flash. There isn't enough natural light to get a high enough shutter speed to freeze movement so you need to add another source of light.

[pschlute]

Can someone with my camera or one like it tell me how i
can set the camera in the future?

Your camera chose the best settings for exposing this image. The ISO was bumped up to 3200. The aperture was set at almost the widest the lens will allow....f4.0 versus f3.5. Finally the shutter speed was selected at 1/15s.

You have a correctly exposed image but as you know your subjects are suffering from motion blur. What this is telling you is that there is not enough light in the image to get a correctly exposed picture AND freeze the action. Bumping up the ISO may help but will introduce noise. Using a faster lens may help but will give you a drastically reduced depth of field, and will make focussing more of a challenge (it can also be an expensive option). Flash is the way to go to deal with this, either use the on-board flash or get an accessory speedlight that attaches to the hotshoe.

[wadge22]

Yes, shutter speed was the main problem. Flash or no flash, wider aperture or not, you need your shutter speed to be faster to freeze the action and capture moving people.

1/250 is probably a good bare minimum for moving, dancing people if you're not using flash, and faster than that (maybe 1/800) would be much better. You would do this by being in Tv mode on the mode dial, and dialing till you see 1/250 or more as the shutter speed. The camera will take care of the ISO and Aperture then to get the exposure right for the shutter speed you tell it.

I don't know exactly how good the K30 does with higher ISOs (the 3200 that shot was at is already pretty high), but I would imagine you would be happier with a higher ISO shot (more grainy, maybe starting to get some color noise) where the action was frozen, as opposed to the blurry subjects you got there.

I would also consider underexposing some by setting the +/- to -1 or -1.3 if that will help you get a faster shutter speed. The picture will look dark on the camera screen, but you can adjust it on the computer, even in the most basic of software, including the one that comes built in to Windows.

The Fundamentals of Exposure is a good article to read if this is all a bit too technical.


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Finally, I'm not saying you need to spend money to solve this, but this kind of poorly lit indoor shot is exactly where having a fast prime lens (like a 50mm f1.7, a 50mm f1.8, or even 50mm f2.8, maybe a 40mm f2.8, or else a 35mm f2.0 or 35mm f2.4 which 35mm might be a little better of a focal length for you) in your kit really helps. Those wide apertures (lower f number) let you set the shutter speed higher.
You could probably find a used autofocus 35 f2 under $250, and a 50 f1.7 or 50 f1.8 under $150, if you look on ebay, and maybe a little more from a camera shop with a nice return policy. Or check in the marketplace here, I see some of those lenses there for even better prices than I mentioned!

[pschlute]

Flash or no flash, wider aperture or not, you need your shutter speed to be faster to freeze the action

With flash providing the main lighting for a scene like this, the shutter speed is irrelevant, as long as it is below sync speed....ie 1/180s or slower. The flash will be firing at a duration in the thousands of a second, and that will freeze the action.

Using a flash means the OP can use a lower ISO (less noise), and a narrower aperture (more DOF)

[calsan]

Always do a quick zoom in and check your results if you're taking photos in a new setting or if there isn't much light. Don't assume that everything is going OK and then have the whole event ruined.

Better to take a noisy or undexposed photo than a blurry one.
As mentioned above, if it looks like you're going to get blur, don't be afraid to increase your ISO or decrease the exposure as a quick solution. Shooting in RAW will also allow you a lot of detail recovery opportunity on the computer.
Software such as Topaz DeNoise can go the extra mile to save a photo if RAW processing alone wasn't enough. Somewhere on pentax forums is a link offering a discount on Topaz software.

Edit:
Found the link:
https://www.pentaxforums.com/articles/deals/topaz-image-quality-bundle-savings.html

[UncleVanya]

This is a party i was Taking photos at. I had trouble freezing the action. Can someone with my camera or one like it tell me how i
can set the camera in the future?
Thanks.

I won’t rehash the info you already got too much other than to say this. Set your iso higher and see if the results are usable. By shooting at iso 3200 at 1/15th /seconds let the subjects motion blur the results. As you balance the exposure factors (iso, shutter speed, available light, aperture) you have to grapple with what to optimize. You can add light (flash or change location/time) you can increase wide open aperture (different lens that has a larger aperture like already suggested) and you can increase iso (more noise). Which one will work best is an optimization question.

If flash is permitted it offers a reasonable path but flash photography can be a complex area to learn and can be more intrusive.

If a faster lens is able to be budgeted then make sure to understand the focal length and other limitations as a prime will be smaller and lighter and cheaper and likely offer wider apertures than a zoom but this offers less flexible framing and subject distances.

If higher iso is the best option there are post processing options to help reduce the impact as well as more recent cameras that offer more high iso performance. Shoot using raw and give a try to a high grade noise reduction option. I personally like DXO PHOTO myself which has fantastic DEEP PRIME noise reduction built in. Even so I’m not sure of the k-30 can deliver much beyond iso 6400 which would allow about 1/30th sec shutter speed in that lighting with that lens.

A combination of approaches (faster lens and higher iso) might give the best results. The sigma 17-50/2.8 or DA* 16-50/2.8 are flexible zooms that offer at least a one stop advantage over what you shot. Adding another stop from iso starts to make this a 1/60th of a second shot and looks like a possible winning combo. As an added bonus the 17-50 is pretty cheap.

The FA 35/2 or DA 50/1.8 also offer even more f stop relief. (2+ stops) but give less flexible framing.

[mtgmansf]

The K30 has a decent, built in flash to try, but true quality would come from using a good and strong, separate flash with a cheap diffuser to soften shadows and smooth skin tones. A picture like the one you show requires good depth-of-field, so you need to shoot somewhere between f8-f16 to get everything sharp. This is how pros shoot weddings, events, parties, etc., in dark places. Another, less good option would be to use LED lights, but that would not give you more than one or two stops in most situations. Agree with others, going higher than 3200iso and lower than 1/250th without flash is not recommended, being a former K30 user, although you might get barely acceptable results using Denoise or other noise reducing software at 6400, which would still have not solved your problem of getting good depth-of-field and little to no motion blur...
Note, Pentax makes great flash units, but so do others for Pentax cameras at lower cost.
So, simple solution if you rent or buy a powerful flash for the next time.

[mlag]

If you are without or at the limit of resources (no alternative lens with better aperture, no flash, no more higher iso on your camera...) you can intentionaly under-expose 1/2 or full stop (using +/-EV) the 1/15 then becomes 1/30 or maybe 1/45 which can help quite a bit (below 1/100 would however be better for such scene). Afterwards you can compensate (increase light) in postprocessing in a foto editor program, also not ideal but usually better than motion blur...
The resulting color range is less good detailed, but is probably less annoying to the human eye than motion blur.

If you shoot a lot of low light indoors events, investing in even a cheap f1.x lens like the 120 $ https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/864663-REG/Pentax_smc_DA_50mm_f_1_8.h...981& can make a difference... (or any of the more expensive options).

[peteedee]

Thanks for all your reply's ! It's funny, I gave my daughter a book from the 50's on basic photography. I should have kept it!!! It's the simple things that trip you up. On the old manual SLR's I would have increased the speed.
But I have to thank the person who said " Turn the selector to Tv then adjust your shutter speed." So when I did this at the gig the read out was( 25" ). So I'm like , 25 inchs?
What is that? But when I read that post I went back to the camera, set it to Tv and kept turning the control knob until it gave shutter speeds like the ones we are used to seeing
like 1/125 !!!!!!!!!! AINT LIFE GRAND! Thanks everybody.

[MarkJerling]

Every image is made using three basic sets of inputs. Shutter speed, aperture and sensitivity (ISO). With ISO, think of that as the sensitivity of the sensor for light, or in film days, how you may have used ASA100 film for bright outdoor sunny shots and ASA400 film indoors.

Looking at your image, the camera set, as others have pointed out, a shutter speed 1/15th of a second, an aperture of F/4.0 and ISO of 3200.
So, with a poorly lit scene, it's gone quite high on the sensitivity scale, slow on the shutter speed and wide open for the aperture. The result is an image which is quite grainy (ISO 3200), shutter speed too slow to freeze movement (1/15th of a second) and a wide aperture of F/4.0 means shallow focus plane, i.e. only a small part of your image can be in focus.

You'll need 1/60th of a second minimum and, ideally, you'd like a narrower aperture, so F5.6 or F6.3. Obviously, a faster shutter speed means less light onto the sensor and a narrower aperture also means less light onto the sensor. So, without bumping up the ISO rating further (which will result in a noisier image) you need, as others have pointed out, more light! Hence the advice of using flash.

Every image you make depends on the relationship between those three basic things: Shutter speed, aperture and sensitivity.
Good luck!

[wadge22]

You've gotten lots of good responses.
I just wanted to chime back in to note that my first response was assuming you weren't going to want to use flash, and probably wasn't perfectly well thought out.
Everyone is right that a powerful enough flash, preferably diffused or bounced, will give best results in that situation. I'm not sure the onboard flash would be ideal, but you already have it so you could give it a shot. It's also true that, even if you had a lens with a wide aperture, it will be tough to get everything in focus since wide aperture = narrow depth of field. That's where having the flash would be better, since you would have enough light to stop down and get a lot of depth of field.

[calsan]

If you can get an external flash there is more you can do than just light up everything in boring whiteness. You can do trailing curtain sync, front curtain sync and other fancy stuff. So you can have a combined sharp photo with ghostly trails that shows movement. Also keeps the colours ambient rather than the washed out look you can get with the internal flash. This is with the AF360 aimed at the ceiling and trailing curtain sync so the subject has trails leading to their final location when the flash fired. It's a bit hit and miss but it's possible to both capture the fun by showing movement and avoid the faces being blurry.
-- Also, being transparent is very slimming, so people like the pictures you do like this. ha ha

[Des]

The K30 has a decent, built in flash to try, but true quality would come from using a good and strong, separate flash with a cheap diffuser to soften shadows and smooth skin tones.

a powerful enough flash, preferably diffused or bounced, will give best results in that situation

^ What these guys said.

Look for a flash unit that can swivel as well as tilt up and down. That way you can point the flash unit so the beam bounces off walls and ceiling from the most suitable angle (without being in the face of someone nearby). You can get a manual flash (ie you set the output level manually) that does this cheaply. Automatic ones (ie ones that do "Pentax Through-the-lens" metering, or PTTL) start with the Godox TT350P and go up in price and weight from there.

One cheap but effective trick is to "flag" the flash - that is, you have something to direct the beam to the relevant wall and not directly onto the subject. See Neil van Niekerk's description of his home-made "black foamie thing": Black foamie thing - Tangents

Practical demo (using the sort of cheap flag sold on ebay) here: Indoor Exposure Mixing - PentaxForums.com