21st Birthday

benjo · 22 Mar 2011 at 19:54

So after seeing my club photography

eek:

), a friend asked me to take some photos at her and her friends joint 21st. They mostly wanted portrait shots of everyone..

Used a Canon 17-55 2.8 and bounced the flash. Still struggled with lighting on some of the shots, so some came out a tiny bit noisy. Here's some of the better ones;

1

2

3

4

I was shooting wide open at 2.8 all night, and had the ISO fairly high. I missed the focus quite a lot on some of the shots though

Even with the flash, 2.8 and high ISO I was struggling to get decent exposure.

Any tips for next time?

bigredshark · 22 Mar 2011 at 19:59

Any reason for shooting wide open? With flash you shouldn't have needed to and unfortunately on a crop you're not getting much bokeh to show for it. If it's for the light then fair enough, a more powerful flash would be nice but you've got to work with what you've got. Still, some nice shots in there, composition and framing could be a little tighter/more inventive in most of them would be my most constructive advice...

benjo · 22 Mar 2011 at 20:02

Thanks for the comments.

Yep was shooting wide open for light reasons. The flash I had was borrowed, and it's not the greatest.

Saving pennies for more equipment, I think a flash is on the cards next

OG · 22 Mar 2011 at 20:28

Looks good to me

for next time however do not be too wary about keeping the aperture nice and wide, your flash will happily compensate for the smaller aperture. Looks like you managed to get enough ambient light in too but keeping your shutter moderately slow too so good work on that one! As has been said possibly a tighter crop may have been nice and perhaps a few black and white conversions could work well on a few of them too?

All in all looking good though!

benjo · 22 Mar 2011 at 21:04

Owen256 said:
Looks good to me for next time however do not be too wary about keeping the aperture nice and wide, your flash will happily compensate for the smaller aperture. Looks like you managed to get enough ambient light in too but keeping your shutter moderately slow too so good work on that one! As has been said possibly a tighter crop may have been nice and perhaps a few black and white conversions could work well on a few of them too?

All in all looking good though!

Thanks mate

I'll try a different aperture next time. I'll see how some black and white ones work too, haven't really been adventurous enough

FlipFlop · 23 Mar 2011 at 19:52

When you say bounced the flash, does that mean angling it upwards slightly towards the ceiling? I have never used an external or addon flash, only the one on my DSLR which I tend to switch off anyway.