help dragging the shutter [night]

[blinkerz]

I always hear the best way to get good ambient background with apertures of f4-f8 is to drag the shutter. How is this done without motion blur due to handholding or the model moving. I presume the shutter dragging would be in conjunction still with relatively high iso so that shutter is not 1sec+...

Any ideas?

 

[PsiFox]

Have a read of

http://www.wedpix.com/articles/013/dragging-the-camera-shutter-at-weddings.html

 

[subseasniper]

Are you going to be using flash for this. If so go to manual and set an exposure where the background is underexposed by -1 or -2 stops. To do this I usually bump up the shutter speed to keep things nice and steady when handholding.

Then simply use your flash in TTL mode and it should expose for the foreground subject and keep the background slightly underexposed. There should still be enough readable detail in the background to keep it part of the image but not too distracting.