I posted the following suggestions to someone requesting help (on another forum) with taking pictures at gigs and how to get reasonable results of both lighting and dancers. i then remembered that I had offerred to do similar on this forum. If anyone wants a further explanation or additional help, please feel free to ask, as it seems a lot easier to me to actually do it than it did to write it all out. I may also have not explained the relationships between certain parts as well as I could as they are second nature to me and I do not really know to what level I am aiming this at.

One of the main things that occurred to me though, is to do this properly, you would need to have a backup DJ/roadie as it would not be so easy to concentrate on both things at once and pull of a good performance with both.

Here goes then:


If you want really good pictures with a good balance of lighting and flash then you really need a camera with full manual control, you also need a decent off-camera flashgun (or one that will swivel/tilt) that has a range of power settings that can then be balanced to give a result comparable with the ambient light. An automatic camera with on camera flash cannot do this easily regardless of how many pixels, or even whether it is digital or film.

Firstly, you need to do some test shots to establish the best EV (exposure value) for your ambient (disco) lighting. That will then give you a range of shutter speed/aperture combinations for that value i.e. 1/15 @ f8, 1/30 @ f5.6, 1/60 @ f4, 1/125 @ f2.8 all of those have the same EV.

Next choose a setting that you think will give you a good balance between some motion and depth of field (depth of field 'dof' is the range of the subject that will seem to be sharp in front and behind of the point of focus, typically 1/3 in front and 2/3 behind). The depth of field range also reduces with proximity so it is important to choose an area to focus on that is towards the middle/rear of your subject matter (subjects close to you may well be blurred anyway as the relationship of speed to distance is similar to that of dof as, as the subject becomes closer to you, you need a higher shutter speed to freeze the movement). The dof is controlled by the aperture value (f2.8 has a little depth of field, f16 would have very much more for the same lens and distance to subject matter). The larger the f number the smaller the aperture, the less light it lets through and the greater the dof.

We will use as an example 1/30 sec shutter speed with an aperture of f5.6. We will focus on an area about 10ft away which should for a 50mm lens (standard on a 35mm SLR) give us a depth of field between 7ft and 16ft (as we move away from these distances the subjects will become less sharp).

Now comes the tricky part.

We now need to set the flash to give us a burst of light for an aperture setting of between f8 and f11 (yes I know this is between two and four times less light than we really need) so as to give us a slight fill light and to freeze the movement of the dancers (flash durations are typically 1/500 sec to 1/10.000 sec so will stop pretty much all movement), but allow a little bit of blurring on the closest dancers to give some sense of atmosphere. Next, we have to aim the flash head at either, a white wall, the ceiling or bounce it off of a bit of card or mini umbrella type device (this is so as to diffuse the flash burst to prevent white-out and harsh shadows forming) but whilst keeping the flashguns sensor pointed at the subject matter (really need an off camera flashgun or one with a swing & pivot head for this).

Up to now I have only offered some suggestions to get you to the starting point, from this point on, you then get into the trial and error mode. Take some shots, see how they come out, adjust settings to suit.
Each venue will be different as they will be bigger, smaller, lit differently, decorated differently and so on.

Best cameras for doing this are either digital SLRs (preferably) or the digital hybrids, they are really the only cameras that will allow full manual override along with using off camera flash and let you instantly see your results to enable adjustments to be made as required.

Oh, and if you have only got a automatic camera with an on camera flash, stick some bits of white tissue paper over the flash lens (try one bit first then two or more) this will soften the flash and help reduce the white-out from the subjects closer to you, won't be great, but will help a lot.

Good luck, I'm looking forward to seeing the results.