irishmage, originally uploaded by viridari.

The same principles that applied to my previous post, about shooting in pub, works well in other situations where you have low ambient light. This was shot a few hours ago in a local coffee shop.

I exposed for the background, but dropped it down 1 stop from a perfect exposure. Then I set my E-TTL flash to sync on the rear curtain. The flash was bounced off of the wall behind me. I focused on my subject, composed the shot to my liking, and BAM!

The final image really conveys well the ambiance of the room but the subject is pretty well lit despite the face that he was actually sitting in a fairly dark spot.

Miracle Man & Djin, originally uploaded by viridari.

This question seems to come up a lot and I thought I’d just write a bit about how I’m currently doing this.

So you’re in a bar or a night club. You want to take pictures but there isn’t quite enough light to get the shot, even at wide open aperture on the highest ISO setting. What do you do?

I don’t know what you do, but here is what I do.

First and most importantly, have a flash for your camera that has E-TTL capabilities, and preferably a head that can be turned in many different directions in order to bounce light off of another surface. In my case, I am using the Canon 430EX Speedlite.

Next, try to get a good exposure on the background area. Aim for a very slow shutter speed, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/15 to 1/30. It’s OK if you have to take the ISO up a bit to get there.

I then use the aperture or the ISO, depending on whether depth of field or low noise is more important, and adjust so that the background exposure is actually one or one and a half stops under the optimal exposure. This way we’ll drink in the ambiance of the room but emphasize the foreground subjects.

Set your flash for rear curtain sync (also known as second curtain sync). This is crucial, especially if your subjects are moving! What this will do is fire the flash at the end of the long exposure instead of at the beginning. If you don’t do this, you can get some really unpleasant motion blurring that occurs after the flash is fired.

I then like to bounce flash off of the nearest wall or maybe the ceiling. Experiment here. I just don’t like to fire the flash directly at my subjects (and they appreciate that courtesy as well).

The flash will help to get a sharp image of the subjects but the nice long exposure will help you to take in the ambient light and background. You’re not going to get good white balance doing this, but when you go to these places you don’t expect to see nice clean white light anyway! You’re going to get the actual colors of the lighting in the room, and it will help the viewer to feel like the picture was taken without flash.

For this example image, Rob and Jen were captured at a local Raleigh pub. I bounced flash off of the wall to camera left. Exposure was 1/20 f/2.8 at ISO 1600. My camera is very noisy at this ISO level and it may have been worthwhile to play with the exposure a little more to try to get a good shot at ISO 800 if at all possible.