Warmly lit living room - Can't get decent photos with a Nikon D60

Trotter

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to take decent photos in a dim, warmly lit room.

In our living room, theres 4 uplights, one in each corner. It means theres a soft orangey yellow light.

When I take photos, it looks for the flash.. and they come out really bright. If I reduce the flash effects, they come out white, but less so, and when I use the 1600 ISO it just looks dull and grainy.

We've a new baby and I just want to have loads taken! Any help would be appreciated!

oshead

Set the camera white balance to tungsten. That will take care of the warm orange light by compensating with blue. Then get a gel, try rosco or lee filters and put the CTO one on the flash. This turns your flash to a tungsten colour. Problem solved. You could also under expose the ambient light (the up lights) by about a stop or so. This will give you a more natural looking fill with the flash. One more thing, bounce the flash off the (white) ceiling or wall for a softer less harsh lighting effect.

Falcon7012

You need to adjust the white balance using one of the presets or by metering off a white or grey surface/piece of card. Alternatively change the type of light bulbs to something colder.

pixbyjohn

Trotter wrote: »

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to take decent photos in a dim, warmly lit room.

In our living room, theres 4 uplights, one in each corner. It means theres a soft orangey yellow light.

When I take photos, it looks for the flash.. and they come out really bright. If I reduce the flash effects, they come out white, but less so, and when I use the 1600 ISO it just looks dull and grainy.

We've a new baby and I just want to have loads taken! Any help would be appreciated!

It would appear that you are using the automatic (P) mode which always looks for the flash unless turned off.
Try Aperture mode and set aperture at say f4, the shutter speed will set automatically. Have camera on Tripod or sitting on something very steady, e.g. a cushion on a stool. ISO 200.
These are just starting settings, now see what results you get without flash.
The shutter speed may be very slow so anything that moves will be blurred..

Thecageyone

You don't say whether it's just the camera's on board flash or if you have a flash gun/unit?

If you have an off-cam flash, bounce it off of the ceiling as suggested. You can keep the ISO well down doing this, I do it all the time. I find in our living room , which has only one strong tungsten lamp when the main lights are off, settings of around: ISO 200, f/4, 1/200sec and bounced 1/4 power flash do the trick.

Otherwise, use much longer exposures where possible, can work really nice with warm lighting once your WB is set correct [already mentioned too] though if the baby is a mover you'll get some blurring.

Ballyman

The uplights probably don't give off enough light to be useable.

You could try and use a bounced flash at -1ev which may be enough to light faces while not bright enough to interrupt the uplighter warmth.

What is it you are looking for? If you want to keep the uplighter warmth while using flash to light people then you coulf gel the flash with orange and go from there.

EDIT: I see Dave has already told you all of this!!! He's pretty intelligent that chap!

Trotter

Thanks everyone. It's the standard on board flash, I don't have a separate one.

Thecageyone

Same settings mentioned earlier will give you clear pictures, but will kill the ambient lighting if you do want to keep some of that? I would try the longer exposures, new borns don't tend to move about very much, you'll even get some nice ones of the baby sleeping. Set up on your tripod, keep the ISO to 100 - 200, set the shutter speed for anything between 1/4 and 1" and set your white balance to tungsten, or Auto if you shoot RAW[?] - you can change it to suit in processing later that way. If you don't have gels tungsten setting does not always automatically go well with tungsten lighting.

line6

you could try using a sweet wrapper like the one round the toffee penny in quality street - it always used to be a nice orangey yellow - and use small pieces of duct tape to keep it over the flash

combined with a tungsten white balance it might be more natural than without

:eek: