Shooting moving subjects in low light

ILikeBananas

This is probably a bit of a stupid question. I bought my first DSLR last month, (a Nokia D3100) and due to the time of year I seem to have spent the majority of time practising shooting indoors at night-time. A lot of the time I've been taking pictures either of friends and family going about their business (i.e. not in a stationary pose). An example would be my niece and nephew opening their presents under the Christmas tree light.

I've been trying to shoot without using the flash and so I've been using the largest possible Aperture settings so as to have the fastest shutter speed. I've tried shooting with ISO 800 and ISO 1600 but at those settings I either get a correctly coloured exposure that is blurry (a shutter speed say of 1/10 sec) or an underexposed shot that is sharp (say 1/60 sec).

To try and get around this I raised the ISO but to get both a sharp image that was correctly coloured I had to raise the ISO all the way to Hi1 and Hi2 (which I believe are equivalent to ISO 64000 and 125000) which leads to a resulting drop in the picture quality.

So...I'm just wondering if this all makes sense or is there something that I am omitting to do?

In this situation is it a choice between

A) using the flash
getting blur in the moving subject
C) getting a underexposed picture or
D) getting a grainy high ISO exposure

DaireQuinlan

nope, that's pretty much it (though i'd probably say noisy as opposed to grainy but whatever). If you start using strobes though investigate using off camera artificial lighting of some description. Finesse it enough and you can make it look almost natural.

5uspect

Try and get to grips with exposure compensation. Remember the scene is one or two stops darker than what the camera is metering for by default.
So set you exposure to be lower accordingly. So you're going to need to be closer to 1/100s than 1/10s exposure. Since you can't do anything about your maximum aperture, unless you get the Nikkor 35mm f/1.8, you're left with balancing ISO.

Also shoot in RAW, you'd be surprised how much detail is lost in a JPEG.

Red Nissan

You need to add more gear.

A flashgun cab swivel and bounce the flash off a white ceiling or wall.
A fast aperture fixed focal length lens, a 50mm ႒1.8 could be a good start.

I'd get the flash first and read up on bouncing.

Zillah

Red Nissan wrote: »

I'd get the flash first and read up on bouncing.

For something like Christmas morning I really don't see how a flash will work - bounced or no - I generally really dislike flash of any kind in enclosed spaces.

OP: Your reference to "correctly coloured" is confusing me - do you mean exposure or does something funny happen with the colour cast of the image?

You could try putting the camera on shutter priority mode, set it to, say, 1/50 and see how well it compensates with everything. High ISO isn't the end of the world, and can be tinkered with in post, and it is certainly preferable to motion blur.

As 5uspect says, a 1.8 prime ens would be much better in low light than the kit lens. As an aside - in case you are using a kit lens - bear in mind that if you zoom in at all it is going to reduce your aperture even more. You're likely in the 3.5 - 5 range, and if you zoom in all the way you're automatically closing down all the way to the 5, or whatever it is for your exact one.

ILikeBananas

Thanks for the replies

5uspect wrote: »

Try and get to grips with exposure compensation. Remember the scene is one or two stops darker than what the camera is metering for by default.

Can you elaborate on this please? Why is the camera metering for a brighter scene by default?

Red Nissan wrote: »

A flashgun cab swivel and bounce the flash off a white ceiling or wall.

Is like one of those flash attachments with the hinge in the middle that you see nightclub photographers have attached on their cameras?

Red Nissan

ILikeBananas wrote: »

Is like one of those flash attachments with the hinge in the middle that you see nightclub photographers have attached on their cameras?

Most Nikon speelits twist and swivel. Done right it has a really natural look to it.

5uspect

ILikeBananas wrote: »

Thanks for the replies
Can you elaborate on this please? Why is the camera metering for a brighter scene by default?

The camera has no idea how bright or dark your scene is. It's calibrated to some level, daylight in Japan on the 28th of July, around tea time, or something. Anyway this should work fine in daylight. In dark scenes you need to effectively tell the camera that it's dark by underexposing. This is exposure compensation.

If you look in your viewfinder you'll see this:

In green at the bottom is a load of info. In the middle (item 11) is the exposure indicator. When you're in Manual mode you use this to figure out how bright or dark the image will come out with the current settings. In P and A modes (Tv and Av on real cameras Canon ) you can use this to bump up or down the scene exposure.

Since your scene is dark you will need to move the marker on the scale to the left. This will either shorten the exposure in A mode or close the aperture in P mode. Most people tend to shoot in A, especially with a fast lens, and let the camera worry about exposure.
Then depending on your scene adjust the exposure compensation to match the scene.
You'll find yourself able to read a scene and say, "Okay, this room is about 2/3 of a stop darker than what my camera is calibrated for" adjust and shoot.

Lyaiera

ILikeBananas wrote: »

Thanks for the replies



Can you elaborate on this please? Why is the camera metering for a brighter scene by default?

I think his reply is a bit muddled. The sensors are generally calibrated to properly expose for grey subject. If the total subject is darker it will expose differently than if it was lighter than average grey. That's when you dial in exposure compensation. It has nothing to do with how much light or darkness there is from a light source.

pixbyjohn

"In dark scenes you need to effectively tell the camera that it's dark by underexposing"
Should that not be the other way round??

5uspect

Lyaiera wrote: »

I think his reply is a bit muddled. The sensors are generally calibrated to properly expose for grey subject. If the total subject is darker it will expose differently than if it was lighter than average grey. That's when you dial in exposure compensation. It has nothing to do with how much light or darkness there is from a light source.

In this case it has everything to do with the light source. What determines what is grey but simply the amount of light bounding off the card? If you put your grey card in a dark room your exposure will need to be long, put that same card in a bright room your exposure is short. Exposure is directly correlated with the amount of light. Therefore metering off the same card in different lighting will result in the exact same image irrespective of the amount of light. But we don't want this, we want to capture a scene as it really is, a bit dark (and without motion blur).

pixbyjohn wrote: »

"In dark scenes you need to effectively tell the camera that it's dark by underexposing"
Should that not be the other way round??

No, if you want to replicate the scene as it (dark) is then you underexpose. If your scene is dark but you want it looking like daylight then you overexpose and get motion blur.

So you could just leave the metering mode and exposure compensations alone and crank up the ISO to achieve a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the movement. Or you could shorten your exposure, give the ISO a modest bump resulting in a darker image with no motion blur. If you're shooting RAW then you can adjust the exposure if needed.

Of course SNR could potentially be worse with a lower ISO and a shorter exposure than with a higher ISO and a longer exposure, but the goal here is to reduce motion blur.

ILikeBananas

Zillah wrote: »

OP: Your reference to "correctly coloured" is confusing me - do you mean exposure or does something funny happen with the colour cast of the image?

Sorry, missed this question: Yes I meant exposure. When I decreased the shutter speed to eliminate the blur I ended up with an image where everything was extremely dark.

Reading through 5uspect's responses this may actually be the scene as is but I dunno-it looks wrong to me.

5uspect

ILikeBananas wrote: »

Sorry, missed this question: Yes I meant exposure. When I decreased the shutter speed to eliminate the blur I ended up with an image where everything was extremely dark.

Reading through 5uspect's responses this may actually be the scene as is but I dunno-it looks wrong to me.

Your eye isn't a linear device, neither is your camera but it's forced to be by default. Your brain is combining many images and processing them so what you see will look better.

The trick here is post processing. Most sensors have a linear log response to light and if you shoot in RAW and edit in a suitable editor like Camera RAW, Aperture, Lightroom or other free alternatives there is a lot you can do to a dark or seemingly overexposed image.

The RAW file contains significantly more data than a JPEG, 2^12 (or 2^14 on some cameras) compared to just 2^8 with JPEG. This means you record 4096 different tones compared to 256 with JPEG giving much more flexibility. RAW is also uncompressed resulting in much bigger file sizes but also nothing is removed giving you control over noise reduction and compression after you've made your exposure edits.

You'll need to do a bit more reading I think to get to grips with digital photography. Thus site is a great start.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com