I was recently asked to take some photos of a local restaurant which was fine - I regularly take photos for local b&b's etc but with a restaurant there is the added ingredient of people!

The restaurant was only dimly lit and I found it impossible to get a good balanced exposure of people at tables, and the background to try and capture some of the atmosphere.

Using flash usually resulted in total loss of atmosphere from the pictures yet without, I was being forced into high ISO and using the lens at f5 (give or take) which affected dof and sharpness.

I rarely use flash so was wondering what sort of approach I should have taken here.

Using a D200 and SB600, my best results came from pointing the flash at the ceiling on a slow sync setting but even this was pretty disappointing.

I don't really want to add some of the shots to the gallery as there were a lot of diners in the restaurant.

Any suggestions? Thanks,
Andrew

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Andrew
DC Mag Gallery
Website

aa78:

I don't really want to add some of the shots to the gallery as there were a lot of diners in the restaurant.

Any suggestions? Thanks,
Andrew

I see you point but go on add them, they might help, plus loads of people on here post pics of people they don't know in the 'street life' thread.

do you have to have dinners in the restaurant? go at closing time if not. But i'm guessing you sort of have too. light sphere?

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The first thing I would do in the same situation, assuming the owner was privy to the shoot, would be to ask to have a little more light, ie light the candles on a few extra tables even if unoccupied and leave a few smaller lights on in the bar area or similar.

 Then I would use a lens with a wide maximum aperture F2.8 or wider if possible and focus on features rather than panoramas (which may have unwanted out of focus elements because of the aperture whereas this is sometimes actually desireable when picking out individual elements)

 And then I would shoot about three times as many shots as I would normally do in exposure bracketed raw at the highest iso I could use with a straight face,( probably about 800 on the D200 and maybe a couple of 1600's in b&w).


Or buy a D3 (or even a D300).   :-)

Stinkyfinger:

Or buy a D3 (or even a D300).   :-)

Good idea!

The max aperture on my lens is f3 but with zoom it drops to f5.6 so can't do much here. I asked about more light but this was all the light there was!

I'll post some pics over the weekend.

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Andrew
DC Mag Gallery
Website

aa78:

I was recently asked to take some photos of a local restaurant which was fine - I regularly take photos for local b&b's etc but with a restaurant there is the added ingredient of people!

The restaurant was only dimly lit and I found it impossible to get a good balanced exposure of people at tables, and the background to try and capture some of the atmosphere.

Using flash usually resulted in total loss of atmosphere from the pictures yet without, I was being forced into high ISO and using the lens at f5 (give or take) which affected dof and sharpness.

I rarely use flash so was wondering what sort of approach I should have taken here.

Using a D200 and SB600, my best results came from pointing the flash at the ceiling on a slow sync setting but even this was pretty disappointing.

I don't really want to add some of the shots to the gallery as there were a lot of diners in the restaurant.

Any suggestions? Thanks,
Andrew

You mean like this ISO 1600, F4 and 1/60s shot with the D3.

You could try a longer exposure like 1/4s at ISO 800, but it needs to be on a tripod or like mine, rested on the table.

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SK
The Best Photographer in the world 4th November - 5th November 2006 & 17th-18 November 2007
Oldboy’s Gallery

Using flash isn't always as bad as you think it is - this article explains about a technique called 'dragging the shutter' - it'll help (well, it helped me eventually!):

http://planetneil.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques/3-dragging-the-shutter/

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