Night Portrait camera settings ??

[rvrkids]

Hello - My daughter recently had her homecoming and all of the kids were outside and it got dark really quick...very little ambient light.

Obviously these were informal portraits so I just had my camera (Nikon d50 with Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 lens) and speedlight (Nikon sb700).

As it was getting dark, I was having a hard time focusing and could sometimes not even see my chosen focus point in my viewfinder...I have learned I need an LED flashlight next time just to get focus locked. Obviously I couldn't use my meter to set my exposure. I needed fast enough shutter to not get blur, small enough aperture to have a larger dof to get focus and my distance to subject was usually @ 8-10 feet (lots of people were there so I didn't have the luxury of setting everything up).

Basically, my flash had to be the key light but I really had no idea what to manually set my camera exposure settings to. I just randomly picked 1/125 shutter, was at iso 800 (I get too much noise at higher iso), and this photo was at f/2.8 (I kept trying to let as much light in as I could but it just got too dark) and luckily it is pretty much in focus but I have several others that are not in focus because my aperture was too open, I was too close and/or the kids were moving.

So, how do you choose camera settings in a situation like this? Could I just pick whatever shutter and aperture I wanted since I was using the flash. I would have liked to be in the range of 1/200 shutter because the kids were moving and an aperture of at least f/5.6 or higher.

I started with my flash on TTL which was auto set to fill when in matrix metering but when it got dark I set metering to spot so flash wasn't just fill and wound up switching flash to manual and kept increasing the power.

Do you think this shot has too much flash power?

Thank You for your help.

 

[CameraClicker]

Shutter speed affects ambient light. Aperture affects both ambient and flash. A flash in TTL mode will apply enough power, if it has it available.

Try out 1/160th or 1/200th, with f/8 or f/5.6. See what the flash in TTL can do with it. To get more background, slow shutter speed, perhaps all the way down to 1/30th or 1/15th, to see the effect. If you are getting too much flash with TTL, you can adjust flash compensation to pull it back a bit.

 

[rvrkids]

Shutter speed affects ambient light. Aperture affects both ambient and flash. A flash in TTL mode will apply enough power, if it has it available.

Try out 1/160th or 1/200th, with f/8 or f/5.6. See what the flash in TTL can do with it. To get more background, slow shutter speed, perhaps all the way down to 1/30th or 1/15th, to see the effect. If you are getting too much flash with TTL, you can adjust flash compensation to pull it back a bit.

Thanks Camera Clicker. I couldn't slow down my shutter because I was getting blur. And there was literally almost no ambient light so I basically the only light I was really capturing was the flash.

So I guess I could have set my shutter and aperture at whatever I wanted (which would have been to eliminate motion blur and have a bigger dof) and just relied on the flash to light my subjects??

 

[CameraClicker]

The camera manual states what sync speed is. That's the fastest speed that has the first curtain all the way open before the second curtain starts to close. If there is little or no ambient light, any shutter speed slower than that will result in motion being frozen by the extremely brief flash.
If there is ambient light, it will allow the scene to register at slow shutter speeds, potentially introducing blur if something is moving.

 

[Forsh]

Just turn up the ISO