Bad light photography advice

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TangoSierra

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David
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Morning all, I'm at a wedding in a couple of weeks and the groom is part of a band who will play on the night. It's indoor and I'm guessing it will be rather dark but I am keen to capture some really good shots of them playing. Can anyone recommend some settings and best lens for me please, will be using my nikon D200 and taking my prime lens and i've just invested in a nikon 16-85??

Thank you.
 
A couple of speedlights off camera would be a good starting point, you would need triggers for them as well though.
 
How fast and what focal length is your prime?

Without adding additonal light.
#1 Shoot RAW - this will give you a bit more control over the final output, especailly noise reduction.

#2 Lens wide open - to gather as much light as possible.

#3 Aperture priority or manual shooting mode.

#4 Metering mode - what ever you are comfortable with, know how to read a histogram

#5 Maximum or near maximum ISO - to make your camera sensitive as possible.

#6 Take whatever shutter speeded you can get - hopefully it will be high enough so that unwanted subject or camera motion is not a problem.

#7 If you have more light than what you think then consider reducing the ISO (to reduce noise) and/or shooting at a smaller aperture to give you more depth of field.

#8 If you have trouble focussing then switch to manual focus (I normally shoot centre focus point only active)

If you find you do not have enough light to shoot then you will need to add light.
 
For me, it all depends on what lighting the band will use on the night.

I know people who play in very good semi-pro bands and they either have their own lights or they get in a bloke with his own gear. The standard can be very high and the best known lighting bloke round here uses multiple lasers, smoke machines and goodness knows what else.

If this is the case then I think it shouldn't be too difficult to get decent shots without any flash or anything like that. When I shot a very good semi-pro band last year, they had their own lighting and I just set the ISO to 1600 (the maximum for my camera), set the mode to shutter priority with a speed of 1/60th and the results were quite reasonable. I expect you'll have better kit than me so under these conditions you'll get good shots.

If the venue doesn't have that kind of lighting then you might struggle. In all the time I've been watching bands in pubs etc I've never seen anyone use a flash and I think bands aren't that keen on them. I would ask the band first before you use a flash and make sure they're O.K. with it.

Good Luck!
 
Thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated. It's the 50mm 1.8 Nikon prime, Richard.... Thanks again, Dave.
 
just an observation from your post

Bad light = awful, terrible, problematic light you want to avoid or kill with a flash. The worst cases are broad bright daylight shooting portraits.

Low light is not necessarily bad (usually quite interesting in fact), you just have to deal with it to make the most.
 
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