Photography in the church (and most dark areas)

patrick0294 · Jul 10, 2011

So today, I was shooting my cousin's bathisment (I was in no way hired or payed, I just did it to learn and never promised any pictures) and I had problems with the low lighting usually in churches, so I slapped on my f/2.8 17-50, I ended up turning the aperture all the way down to 2.8 my shutter speed was at about 1/50 and (as a last resort) my ISO was set to 800 (I'm shooting with a Rebel T1i btw, because I'm a beginner :er

And I ended up getting a lot of grain. Is there something else I could do? I did use the on-board flash because I needed to (and they still turned out under-exposed). Or would I have to get a hot shoe mounted flash (with a soft box defuser)?
Thanks in advance.

Edit: also, any tips on setting custom white balance? All I know is that I take a picture of white and set that picture in the settings menu. Is that all?

patrick0294 · Jul 10, 2011

Anyone?

flea77 · Jul 11, 2011

First off, what you saw was not "grain", it is digital noise, you can't have grain without film.

Now I shoot Nikon so I am not that familiar with your camera but from looking at the specs it should be able to do iso 800 without being too bad. One thing to remember, shooting iso 800 underexposed and then trying to brighten them up in PP will make the noise look far worse than shooting at iso 1600 and getting the correct exposure. Can you show us an example? Also, have you tried any noise reduction software?

Allan

patrick0294 · Jul 11, 2011

Havent tried it yet. Ill try it out in a few hours. As far as at iso shooting, ill post a pic as soon as i can

tirediron · Jul 11, 2011

The only solution for lack of light is more light. If you've got your aperture open wide, your SS down, and your ISO to maximum usable level, than you need to add more light to the scene in the form of strobes. Pop-up flashes aren't very effective at the best of times, and for lighting larger areas, they're all but useless. It sounds to me like your only solution would be to add one or more strobes/speedlights to increase the number of photons in the air.

With respect to WB, I'm not overly fond of pre-setting a custom WB unless you KNOW that the lighting won't change. You're much better off shooting RAW and correcting to a known white point or until the image looks visually correct in post.