help PLZ Flash problems and camera shake.

Mariquita · Oct 10, 2015

Hi there, I have little experience with photography. I shoot in a club that is crazy lit on the stage and all black walls and lazers. I shoot the people mainly in groups and not often the stage (becouse i get depressede when i try). On the stage I can't get one shot right. Either overexposed or underexposed or blurry.

The main problem are the people in groups. My job is to take photos of all the visitors. If I get to shoot 1-5 people and they are standing with their backs to the Super lit stage I get very nice and sharp photos. My problem is groups 7-15 people standing with their back to the black wall and the ceiling that i cant bounce flash off and need to point it in their faces and the ppl closer get blownout , the flash cant somehow freeze the motion and evryting is blurred and people further away are underexposed and also blurred .
Canon 5D markIII
Tokina 2.8 28 70 i shoot 2.8 singles and 4.6-7.1 froups
iso 800-2000
0''3 - 50
ettl Yongnuo 600RT -1 till +1 FEC

dennybeall · Oct 10, 2015

Sounds like you can't use wall mounted flash units so how about a 2 or 3 strobe rig on your camera? Perhaps a bar 18 inches across with one on each end and one in the middle.

wfooshee · Oct 10, 2015

Even though you're using a manual exposure setting, I think you're using auto flash and the stage lights are fooling your metering. ~3273 is a great example of that, with a white spotlight right into the lens. The camera interprets that as return from the metering pre-flash and reduces flash power accordingly.

Shutter speed of 1/4 second?!?!?!? Why???? The long shutter gives you the motion blur. That's especially too long with ISO 1250. The background will fade towards black with a reasonable shutter speed, but things that move will not be frozen but the flash the way people think unless the flash is the only light on the subject. If the shutter speed is long enough for ambient light to register in the camera, then it registers; simple as that.

In ~3414 the distance to the subjects varies too much. The girl on the right is focused, but the people on the left (farther away) are not. The distance difference is also why they are darker. Light falls off with the square of the distance difference, so a subject twice as far from the flash only get 1/4 of the light.