Need Help with Night Shots

FattyChalupa

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Hello everyone!

The National Arts Honors Society at my highschool is volunteering at a Halloween festival at a park tomorrow from 3:00-8:00 pm, and as a member they have asked me to go around taking portraits of mothers and their kids.

For the first part of the festival, I will most likely be using my 50mm prime lens, but I'm worried about when night falls. The problem is that I am a complete newbie shooting portraits at night with flash, and end up blindly shooting with random settings and praying the exposure turns out good.

So as of now, I will be using my speedlight with a diffuser on, but I have a lot of question I'm hoping everyone can help me out with.

1) Since the event will be outside, it will be pointless to angle the speedlight correct? Will I be forced to point it straight at the subject and thus possibly end up with a harshly lighted picture?

2) Since I am so new at this, do you guys recommend I should leave the flash on TTL or atleast try to experiment with the manual mode a little bit?

3) Say for instance the flash is set to manual- how do I judge what aperture and shutterspeed to use? Does the camera's exposure meter account for the fact a speedlight is on (I use a Nikon d80 by the way). I'm contemplating on just setting the camera AND flash both on automatic when night comes since I'm so inexperienced with this

4)Also when night comes should I just stick with the 50mm lens?

Thanks for any help!
 
I think it's a good idea to use the 50mm lens. For a start it will/should have a nice big aperture (1.8) which will be useful in the low light, but also a prime lens means that most of the portraits you do will be from the same distance. This is key because you can set the camera and flash settings manually and then leave them - play around before the event and find a good combination of settings that works for a night portrait with that lens, then stick with the settings and you can always bump up or down the ISO to compensate the exposure if necessary.

Also, if the flash diffuser you are talking about is one of these:
Stofen-Omni-Bounce-diffuser.gif


Then don't bother using it outside - all that it will is make the flash work harder and flatten your batteries faster. Aim the flash straight forward, there is no ceiling to bounce off outdoors. You should find that with a nice wide aperture lens and the right combination of settings that the flash lighting isn't too harsh.

For settings, try something like the following to get you started:
ISO400
f/3.2
1/50s
Flash on TTL with -1 EV exposure compensation (or whatever the equivalent nikon term is)
 

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