Nightmare day

[Xerse]

So, Friday night i spent all night with my macro kit, finding nothing but spiders and snails...great. so I kept at it until about 6am-ish, went home and decided to goto bed.

However..i didn't make it to bed, the sunrise came and i went back out with my macro kit, until about 4pm. (tired yet?)

It hit 8pm, I was literally about to step into the hot tub to relax with my nephew, and my phone goes off, it was my brother. "She can't get the settings right on her camera it's just black photo's" - His girlfriend recently bought a nikon entry level DSLR (i honestly don't know the model, but it was around the £150-200 mark) and she agreed to tog at a uv party.

I tried telling her what to do to make it brighter, camera will only go to 3200 ISO, lens was wide open at f/4.5 (kit lens) still, black. (they didn't want flash photography there)

I got another phone call from my brother, asking "Would your camera do a better job?"
I said he could come get it and see, "i was more thinking i would come pick you up and you can try it on site"

Great.
Turned the hot tub off, got the nephew out and dried off, headed inside and got my camera stuff together.

I do nothing even remotely similar to this sort of photography, i like macro, and animals. not people! not low light!

I'm extremely self conscious, shy, nervous and let's not forget tired!

I went with my 50mm f/1.8, get as much light in as possible (and it's a great lens) ISO 6400 and varying shutter speed depending where i was in the room, but average around 1/60 - 1/100.

Some of the photo's are obvious bins, but i took a LOT to try combat this issue.

What sort of editing is best for these low light party type shots? Please help with this nightmare!

I didn't even get a fiver out of it! A pint of diet coke (who drinks diet coke?!) and a red bull. What a night.

 

[chris malcolm]

If your usual image editor isn't rated as having top class noise reduction then either switch editor to one with a good reputation for that, or add a well regarded plugin for noise reduction, or use a stand alone noise reduction program. Best results come from customising the settings carefully for each image. Don't do any sharpening before doing noise reduction. The best sharpening in very noisy images is done with the noise reducer, which is sensitive to the differences between noise and detail, and lets you move back and forth between the best trade off between losing noise and losing detail. My own preference is to leave more noise than most like to see for the sake of preserving detail, and then downsize the image to average out the remaining noise. Don't forget the partygoers won't care about sharpness or noise in the image. If the shot catches a good expression it's a good shot.

If you're never going to do this kind of noisy low light shooting again the learning required to master a good sophisticated noise reduction tool may not be worth it.

Another solution to the low light and no flash problem at the time is to see whether they'll put up with a bit of exta illumination, such as a small video LED panel light or even a torch with a good wide smooth diffuse beam, or switching out some of the dim light bulbs in the room for brighter ones you've brought along. I can't remember her name, but a famous newspaper portrait photographer used to carry an anglepoise lamp to portrait shoots

 

[Sadlybrokeboy]

Sounds like you've been dropped in at the deepend to be fair, but by the sounds of it - you've done all you can to try and head the obvious pitfalls of the conditions. Would say that from your perspective there's not else that you can do.

As for PP - think Chris is right - have a look at Noise Ninja or something like that if you can, the NR some of the 3rd party apps can offer is very good and the results surprising.

What PP software do you use?