Christmas moments that last a lifetime

The Hay Team

The Hay Team

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Fiona
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Hi

This is my first post so be gentle with me :). I'm looking for some advice on photographing my kids at nighttime events. The dark nights and Christmas lights are causing me some issues. We have a number of events scheduled and I want to capture all of the precious Christmas moments but failed miserably last year. To give you some examples we are heading to the light exhibition at Glasgow botanical gardens and Disneyland Paris this year. I have conducted research that advises a tripod to avoid shake however as you can appreciate this isn't ideal with a family in tow.
Look forward to hearing your views.
 
Try upping the ISO Have the kids lit by the light source. If you cannot do that use flash. balanced so as not to cancel out the background lights.
 
Hi Fiona,

One of our members, Matt @MWHCVT , is very good at night time photography and what can be achieved

I have tagged him in this post so he will see it and hopefully he will be along to offer some help.

Take care,

Keith
 
It depends on a couple of things..
  • The equipment you have available and your knowledge/experience of how to use it
  • How much you're prepared to let taking the photo take precedence over enjoying the experience
Expensive high-end gear with fantastic low-light capabilities and fast lenses can, to a certain extent, buy your way in to the capability of taking better photographs in lowlight and other troublesome situations. But only practice and experience will allow you to make the most of them.

A tripod can interfere with the family experience, and isn't necessarily going to fix problems anyway as it assumes longer exposures and children aren't known for staying still for the duration.


The easy solution, just go with what you have. Use flash for some shots and not for others. Enjoy the experience. Sharpness is over-rated, the slightly blurred, slightly misexposed shots don't count - they are just as good a reminder of the memories of the experience as anything else And it's the memories that count.
 
vetonbike said:
Try upping the ISO Have the kids lit by the light source. If you cannot do that use flash. balanced so as not to cancel out the background lights.
Click to expand...
Thank you for your response - I will try this c
 
Alastair said:
It depends on a couple of things..
  • The equipment you have available and your knowledge/experience of how to use it
  • How much you're prepared to let taking the photo take precedence over enjoying the experience
Expensive high-end gear with fantastic low-light capabilities and fast lenses can, to a certain extent, buy your way in to the capability of taking better photographs in lowlight and other troublesome situations. But only practice and experience will allow you to make the most of them.

A tripod can interfere with the family experience, and isn't necessarily going to fix problems anyway as it assumes longer exposures and children aren't known for staying still for the duration.


The easy solution, just go with what you have. Use flash for some shots and not for others. Enjoy the experience. Sharpness is over-rated, the slightly blurred, slightly misexposed shots don't count - they are just as good a reminder of the memories of the experience as anything else And it's the memories that count.
Click to expand...
I love your thinking! Thank you
 
Keith W said:
Hi Fiona,

One of our members, Matt @MWHCVT , is very good at night time photography and what can be achieved

I have tagged him in this post so he will see it and hopefully he will be along to offer some help.

Take care,

Keith
Click to expand...
Perfect - thank you so much x
 
Hi Fiona, and welcome to the forum, probably your best option is going to be using flash to freeze the kids nice and sharply in the image and then a relatively slow shutter speed to allow the camera to capture some of the ambient light from the rest of the scene...you'll need to use front curtain flash ideally so that the flash fires at the very start of the exposure, and then maybe a 1/10th or slower exposure time, with a relatively wide aperture in the realm of f/4 this should be wide enough to allow sufficiently ambient light in but also narrow enough enough to give enough DoF to show where the photo was shot, as part of this was to show the events your at there is not point having it all blurred out by DoF

It's pretty much the same process as if often used for night club photography so if you google shutter dragging it will give you a lot of information :thumbs:

Matt
 
As alluded to above, the advice will be equipment dependant so to help us help you:

What camera do you have
What is your fastest lens (lowest f no)
Do you have a flashgun? or is there a flash on your camera?
 
MWHCVT said:
Hi Fiona, and welcome to the forum, probably your best option is going to be using flash to freeze the kids nice and sharply in the image and then a relatively slow shutter speed to allow the camera to capture some of the ambient light from the rest of the scene...you'll need to use front curtain flash ideally so that the flash fires at the very start of the exposure, and then maybe a 1/10th or slower exposure time, with a relatively wide aperture in the realm of f/4 this should be wide enough to allow sufficiently ambient light in but also narrow enough enough to give enough DoF to show where the photo was shot, as part of this was to show the events your at there is not point having it all blurred out by DoF

It's pretty much the same process as if often used for night club photography so if you google shutter dragging it will give you a lot of information (y)

Matt
Click to expand...
Wow, what a fantastically detail response. Thank you for taking the time, I will do my homework this week x
 
At the easy end, I've used compact cameras that have a "night portrait mode". This balances flash with ambient lighting. It will set the flash and shutter speed as suggested above. The results, even from a cheap camera can be good. But sometimes the background needs a very long exposure which can spoil a shot. To counter that, as others said, use a high ISO. Try 800 and and see if it looks too grainy/noisy.

So before you go somewhere special take the family to the shops at night, shoot them with normal flash, then a long exposure flash, and even try without flash but with a higher ISO. And perhaps look up techniques for steadying a handheld camera.
 
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