Spanish fiesta deely - do these look too dark?

Raider · 5 Oct 2006 at 10:22

I took a few snaps at this Spanish fiesta thing that a friend of mine was performing in. The bar / restaurant was pretty dark, hence I had to use flash for most of the images.
Anyway, I processed these last night, but i'm not sure whether some of them look too dark, as I think my laptop screen is a bit too bright (hence it makes images look lighter). So to cut a long story short, do these images look too dark on your monitor?

The ones that i've done so far are here:
Photo Gallery - Fiesta!

But here are a couple of samples:

(No Flash here!)

Black everywhere.. so I guess it's bound to look dark

Opinions welcome.. thanks!

Beepcake · 5 Oct 2006 at 10:55

Number 1 and 3 look fine to me. The first one especially sets the right 'mood'.. I was thinking maybe you should crop the coat out, but I think it adds to the sense of a cosy restaurant.

The others look like the flash has been a little too strong, too much difference between the foreground and the background. I doubt you could pull much more from the background without overexposing the foreground. Unless you resort to Photoshop jiggery pokery or HDR the crap out of it like cyk

KIMMETT · 5 Oct 2006 at 12:25

If you opened up the aperture with the flash photos you would have let more background light in, and they would look less 'flashed'. A lot of those photos have apertures around 7.1.

Cheers

Kimmett

Raider · 5 Oct 2006 at 13:05

Yeah I kept the aperture above F5.6 most of the time for two reasons:

1) I was using the Kit lens so wanted to keep things as sharp as possible. Below F5.6 in low light always gives me bad results
2) Because things were moving fast, and because I was often snapping more than one person I didn't want too shallow a DOF.

I've just ordered a Canon 430EX Flashgun, which should be with me tomorrow. With that attached, i'll be able to use my 17-40L with the flash (using the built-in flash the 17-40L is too big and blocks some of the light!).