Working inside - with flash

[Village Idiot]

That's what i did with this shot but i also used iso800

And if you're doing this in a room with lights that are a different color temperature than your flash and you're getting enough ambient, your white balance is going to be all screwed up. You would have to gel your flash and make sure you're not bouncing off anything besides white walls and white ceilings so that your flash doesn't take on a tint.

 

[Overread]

thanks for the advice - I will try and give it a go (so probably in about a years time ).

As for the ISO I try to keep mine below ISO 400 - going to 800 I just get too much noise in shots for my liking, though at times its all that can be done (in very poor lighting) its not something that I want to make a part of my normal shooting* (I just get shots that I hate)

*until I get a better camera

Thanks for the imput on the ISO ambient lighting VI. I wonder what wooden beams on the ceiling would do?

 

[Village Idiot]

thanks for the advice - I will try and give it a go (so probably in about a years time ).

As for the ISO I try to keep mine below ISO 400 - going to 800 I just get too much noise in shots for my liking, though at times its all that can be done (in very poor lighting) its not something that I want to make a part of my normal shooting* (I just get shots that I hate)

*until I get a better camera

Thanks for the imput on the ISO ambient lighting VI. I wonder what wooden beams on the ceiling would do?

I was actually shooting at ISO 1600 on the regular with my 30D, which has very similar ISO performance to your XTI. If you expose properly, or even slightly over expose (which is easy when you're making the light) and then reduce the exposure in something like ACR, then it's easier to control the noise. If you're using a program where you can do noise reduction and layers, then you have yet another tool for controlling noise. The snake shots I have in the nature section were shot at ISO 3200. I added a layer which I hit with the highest noise reduction that imagenomic's neat image could do and reduced the opacity to about 50%, which helped eliminate nost of the noise without having pictures that looked like plastic. Plus you could always do the same thing with selecting what subject you wanted to apply noise reduction to (this is something I use when I don't want to take twenty minutes to do skin touchups to people pictures).

Noise isn't necessarily a bad thing and looks good in certain situations, you just need to know how to control it.

30D, ISO 1250, no NR:

 

[Overread]

True it can work - I am just anti noise
But that is an interesting idea with the noise removal layer and opayancy - so far I have used noise removal layers where I have selected specific areas to have noise removed from (mostly the background areas) though I will admit that at times I am lazy and don't bother (for the web a lot of noise vanishes when a photo is only around 1/3rd of the size) though for printing I do try and get things right

 

[ASH PHOTOS]

I came across your post and was hoping you could help me! I am a newbie - and had posted a question but maybe I wasn't specific enough. I want to be able to take indoor pictures of my boys/family in the way that you took these photos. I especially liked the first one. Can you explain to me in newbie terms what I need to do to get shots like these? Natural light is very limited in our house. I have a Sony DSLR a300. Thanks so much!!!

 

[Overread]

pretty much all I did is in the first post - the camera was set to manual mode and the ISO, shutter speed and aperture used are listed below each shot. As for the flash I aimed it at the ceiling (this does require a proper flash gun rather than a popup flash which can only point forwards) and also use a softbox on teh flash to diffuse the light - though if you don't have one some folds of white toilet paper held over the flash can work as well.

 

[Samanax]

I came across your post and was hoping you could help me! I am a newbie - and had posted a question but maybe I wasn't specific enough. I want to be able to take indoor pictures of my boys/family in the way that you took these photos. I especially liked the first one. Can you explain to me in newbie terms what I need to do to get shots like these? Natural light is very limited in our house. I have a Sony DSLR a300. Thanks so much!!!

Do you have an external hot shoe Speedlite (flash) or will you be using the built-in flash?

This web site has good information about shooting inside with an external hot shoe mounted Speedlite.