[Zafar Iqbal]

For low light shots like the ones you posted, drop your exposure by -1 from the meter reading to maintain the dark mood.

I have yet to find my style regarding how I want my (very) low light exposure to be. One one hand I love seeing shots with very moody lighting because of the exposure settings. On the other hand, when I take the photos, I feel subjects must be clearly visible.

if people start noticing the noise instead of the shot then probably your shot isn't good enough so it doesn't really matter anyway.

Well said. I appreciate good shots over technical quality. I once shot at a wedding around midnight and had accidentally dialed the exposure to a wrong setting on my second camera. I got a handful nearly pitch black shots but restored some detail by pushing in post. The photos were still so good, despite the very harsh noise, that I included them in the final DVD.

[emalvick]

One thing I've been working on lately for my own shooting dark or light is letting up on the worries about highlights. Highlights are a natural part of photography, and I think we obsess a bit about keeping detail in them when it may only be important if it is affecting the primary subject of your photo. Trying to preserve highlights I think leads us to underexposure of the remaining parts of the image, which in turn leads to a need to push the exposure for most of the image.

If we relax a bit on our needs to preserve the detail in every highlight, dark scene photography would probably be better. As it is, I find the histogram on my K5 to be a bit deceiving anyway. The histogram we see is for the 8 bit JPG shown on the LCD and not so much the RAW image file. The dynamic range is much better than what we see, and it takes a fair amount of over-exposure on the highlights end to loose our detail.

I find I can usually do ok just keeping the highlights end from dominating the histogram. I'd much rather be reducing the exposure in post-processing than having to push it. That seems to make a lot of difference in the noise levels seen keeping in mind that using ISO to push your exposure on the camera is not necessarily ideal.

I do observe that using high ISO works best in bright scenes and that my usable ISO limit goes down as the scene becomes darker. I think that is somewhat of a given. Noise seems to read its head most in the darker regions of our photos. It's something we have to live with. Pixel peeping on noise and our screens make us believe we have more problems than we really do. With the >10 MP images we have these days, I'm slowly working at adjusting a noise and sharpness so the whole image looks good rather than focusing on 1:1 snippets that are probably 2-3 times bigger physically than what I'd ever print.

[Zafar Iqbal]

I will finally be able to do some proper tests (don't tell anyone) during a birthday party tomorrow. There will be lots of children running around and whatnot so I think that's a very bad case scenario for low light photography without using the flash. Lucky me :P

I might turn to the flashes at some point and I also have few things I need to nail down when they are involved. I hope I get most of my concerned looked at and understood. Will be photographing an engagement party in 5 days and using a flash at that event would be a big no no.

emalvick: Preserving highlights when there is otherwise plenty of light is doable - I've been doing it pretty much ever since I got my K-x. But in low light.. yeah, I might want to sacrifice them. Getting the exposure right so faces stand out natural/well lit is more important and I can't push/pull as much with low light footage.

Reducing the exposures in post - yes, that's definitely where I'd rather want to be at. I always push it and run into trouble :P

The noise itself is the least of my concerns. I need more dynamic range and I can only get that by decreasing the ISO. I want color detail. I want smooth transitions in colors, tones and all that. I want to be able to raise the Vibrance parameter and see the subtle tones dramatised if and when needed. This is something that would/could make the photos look pro. Most of my current low light photos look like anyone could have taken them and I'm not too happy about that. I (any serious dSLR enthusiast, I suppose) am supposed to be better than the average guy.

anyways.. will be a fun and very interesting day tomorrow. I'll let you guys know how it went. I'm not too optimistic about it tbh because of it being a child birthday party.

[Zafar Iqbal]

Came home some hours ago and just finished first round of proofing. I relied mostly on Samyang 85mm f1.4 on cam 1 and 35mm Ltd Macro f2.8 on cam 2.

My settings on cam 1 were mostly 1/60, f1.6-1.8 and ISO 800.
Cam 2 ranged between 1/40-1/60, f2.8 and ISO 1100-1250.

I used flash during groups so I could stop down a bit.

The events started for me as always - the exposures, or the light rather, looked horrible when revewing the pics (well, it was. Eyes rather dark no matter where people went). I even did panic and mounted a flash - but then convinced myself to carry on without it. I spend a bit time to set a better whitebalance and then things looked workable. During the evening I came to love the exposures I was getting. I pretty much never do that.

The pics already have some of the qualities I've been missing. There might be a handful photos that needs to be pushed due to occasional accidental turns on the dials but most are brightly exposed and look very good in that regard.

My first round keep/delete ratio is much higher than what I'm used to but this is partly because of the manual lens which I used 90+ % of the time, and partly because there were plenty of children running and playing.

So far I'm rather happy. My focusing needs to improve especially for wedding stuff but I many (not enough though) tack sharp manually focused photos - all thanks to custom focusing screen. The Samyang is impossible with stock.

So, now I have this engagement party coming up soon and I feel much more ready for it.

I should have done some experiments with higher ISO but same exposure ratio. Never got around to it.

[audiobomber]

What bodies are you using?

[Zafar Iqbal]

2 K-30s

The light level was a tad higher than what I usually get but otherwise ugly shadow going on. Straight above lights leading to darkened eyes on everyone.

[Zafar Iqbal]

Was at an engagement party with even more light going on. Both previous events were lit with more light than what I am otherwise used to, but you could say it made practicing easier (too easy in most regards though). I shot using my 70-200 @ 1/125 on one body and a bit later decided to bump the ISO from 1600 to 3200 to obtain faster shutterspeed - that was a big mistake though. I don't think I've ever shot under florescent light except this one time - the faster shutter speeds made it very apparent I was shooting under florescent with that color banding going on - fortunately I didn't do too many exposures with fast shutterspeeds.

Few other things came to mind: The light was evenly lit (boring!) on both events - there were some areas with more interesting lighting than others, but I was only able to tell this after I came home, imported and reviewed. Any hints on how to keep an eye for the good spots?

I got tons of group photo requests during both events - everything from 2 persons to 10+ and while I expect to be shooting at even dimmer light conditions, I'm even as it has been, worried about DoF. I used flash on the first event for group shots. Didn't fancy the bounced flash look but I got sharp images. I didn't use flash during the engagement and while the overall look remained the same, I didn't always get sufficient DoF. I suspect most were AF related.

[Zafar Iqbal]

Oh boy, oh boy. Finally had a proper opportunity with low light photography. Previous occasions had too much light going on.

I exposed to the right to a degree that I feared I was overdoing it. RAW files turned out awesome. The noise is there but looks so nice. I did some ISO 20000 tests and while the noise is that much more apparent, it still looks amazing. No, it looks super amazing.

I was struggling while I was shooting because of the display. I've always had a hard time judging my exposures by the looks of the pic on the display, and while I did rely a lot on the histogram, it doesn't tell how the noise is going to be.

I've always hated the previews I get. Even tonight, sharp pics would look unsharp because colors betting smudgy and thereby making the pics look soft, and the noise looking like I had way more going on that I actually did. I stuck with it and when I imported the RAw files, my jaws dropped

[Sagitta]

I was struggling while I was shooting because of the display. I've always had a hard time judging my exposures by the looks of the pic on the display, and while I did rely a lot on the histogram, it doesn't tell how the noise is going to be.

I learned quickly to never judge the final image by what the default JPG looks like.

This...




Became THIS, and merely by adjusting levels and vibrancy.

[Zafar Iqbal]

That's a very nice shot and good editing. My problem isn't editing related but the fact that I've been working with graphics for soooo many years that I'm used to instant and reliable feedback - I'd expect to trust the display a bit more when it comes to focus and noise related evaluation - most the other color, contrast and whatnot stuff is something I do not pay attention to till post work.