freezing movement at night, no flash

[puyjapin]

i was taking a picture of a strret scene at night, but only have the built in flash hence the shutter speed had to be slow to get the light in, obviously all the people are blurry, is it possible to set up to freeze motion at night with no flash?

 

[Orgnoi1]

Well... if you have a camera that can go to extremely high ISO... with a lens that is extremely fast (>1.8) theres a chance with the ambient light to get fairly fast shutter speeds... maybe even fast enough to have fairly decent stopped motion... but really its a crapshoot as theres no way for anyone to know just how dark it is...

 

[rubbertree]

I just did a nighttime event (parade and Christmas event) and used a flash (SB 600) in some and not in others.
I upped the ISO to 640, used a fast lens (f/1.8) and also used shutter speed priority in many shots with people, set to 1/15. This was slow enough to let the right amount of light in but also fast enough to freeze the action and also to stop any camera shake from hand holding the camera. Of course using a tripod would help with that as well, but in my situation , I could not use a tripod.
Of course you will have to experiment with settings yourself, you might have to up the ISO more depending on the ambient lighting. But try out the shutter speed priority. I could not go full manual out there in the dark with all that action and aperture priority, at the widest I could go, still didn't give me enough speed to not have blurry pictures. Shutter speed was the answer.

 

[GeneralBenson]

I don't know what your pictures looked like, but as far as I know, 1/15 is not fast enough to freeze movement even if people are barely moving or stop camera shake with a 50mm.

 

[rubbertree]

I'm actually editing them right now and they turned out ten times better than I was anticipating. This was my first nighttime event so I was a little nervous about it. It just so happened that Popular Photography's current edition showed up at my door about 2 weeks ago and it has a few pages in it devoted to nighttime Christmas photography. That is where I learned about using shutter speed priority and using no less than 1/15 without a tripod or VR.
There are of course a few blurry ones that are totally unusable of course. But out of the 250 pictures I took, only about 20 had to be trashed because of blur but those mostly were when I was trying to pan with the moving parade and they ended up blurry.. There are also a few where the person in the parade is waving their hand and the hand is blurry but the faces are still very sharp. So that's okay, it just implies motion. Not exactly freezing motion I guess!
There are a few other situations like that but overall they turned out very good. I'm very happy with them.

 

[Craddie]

Wow - 1/15 is still REALLY slow for handheld - especially with a longer lens. Your Sigma is the only one I'd even try that slow with.

Hard to get around this problem without either a good flash or a camera that is solid up to ISO6400+

 

[tirediron]

The short answer to the OP's question: No.

 

[rubbertree]

Wow - 1/15 is still REALLY slow for handheld - especially with a longer lens. Your Sigma is the only one I'd even try that slow with.

Hard to get around this problem without either a good flash or a camera that is solid up to ISO6400+

I didn't use a longer lens, I used the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8

 

[tsaraleksi]

Wow - 1/15 is still REALLY slow for handheld - especially with a longer lens. Your Sigma is the only one I'd even try that slow with.

Hard to get around this problem without either a good flash or a camera that is solid up to ISO6400+

When the flash is your primary light, then you can set the shutter speed to whatever speed you wish. You could shoot at 1" if you wanted, provided the ambient light doesn't overwhelm the flash.