Courtesy MorgueFile.com

I’m sure you can remember in recent memory where you were at an event for your child, a loved one or a friend. You have your battery charged, your memory card freshly formatted and you snap away all day. You return home with excitement as you are importing your photos. You’ve taken hundreds of shots and are excited to see how they turned out.

Your heart sinks into your stomach a bit when you see that a number of your shots are blurry or dark. “What the heck happened?,” you ask yourself.

Many events, be family or the like, are not always lighted well. You might be in a large gymnasium with huge fluorescent lights 20 feet in the air or in a dark function room.

You have to do your best to prepare for the lighting conditions in which you will be shooting. Some times it’s the last thing on the to do list for most people, but for a photographer, the equipment is often prepped before the clothes are ready. The night or two before the event, ask yourself if you know where the venue is located. If yes, skip to the bulleted items. If not, open up your browser and google the location by address, town and state. See if you can find any photos on a web site to see where you will be shooting.

• Is the location bright or dark?
• What kind of light is there? Candle light, fluorescent, natural, etc.
• Is it a place that allows flash? Like a church, etc.

I do not want to over simplify, but I am going to break it down into two scenarios; Lots of light or lacking light.

Lots of light

The more light you have, the “easier” it is for the camera to expose a perfect shot.  Now the reason the word “easier” is in quotes, is because too much light can also be challenging, but that is a topic for another post.  I digress. With an abundance of light, the camera, working in conjuction with the lens and the shooter have a better probability of a correctly exposes shot. Why? Well, for example, when there are moving objects, a fast shutter speed is paramount to “stopping” the subject in motion. An example to consider: You’re taking photos at your child’s birthday party. It’s a sunny day outside and the kids at the party are running around and playing on the swing set. When you take the shots of those children, I’m sure in most cases you are able to effectively “stop” them in motion as they are swinging or sliding down the slide.

Lacking Light

Now consider another child’s birthday party. This one is also outside, but takes place just after dusk when the sun is going down. Now for the sake of my example, let’s assume there is no flash present on your camera.  As with the well-lit daytime party, the children are running around and playing. Swinging on the swings and sliding down the slide. Now you and your child’s eye adjusts to the lack of light.  You are able to see fairly well even though the sun is going down.

Your camera’s functionality and electronics are dwarfed by the human eye. So what you can see out of your eye is not what you’ll get out of your camera.

Now when you take shots, your camera is trying its best to expose the image properly. So to allow the sensor in your camera to take in enough light, the shutter has to stay open longer. And if the shutter stays open longer and you have moving subjects, what do you think you will see?  You guessed it. Your images become blurred.

The answer then is to “find” more light. How do we find more light?  The short, but complete answer is:

• Increase the ISO (film or sensor sensitivity to light)
• Open the aperture (Lower your f-stop number)
• Introduce a light source to provide the necessary light

Increasing your ISO causes your sensor to become more sensitive to light. The trade-off for this is that if you raise your ISO too high, your photos will become “grainy”. I suggest you experiment with the ISO settings on your particular camera to get an idea as to what’s an acceptable level of grain.

Open the aperture on your lens. With many cameras, automatic settings adjust ISO, shutter speed and aperture to expose the best shot possible. Modifying the aperture means that you are able to be in some creative mode in your camera, but certainly will be available with “Manual” mode. Opening your aperture has other side effects, the most prominent being shrinking your “Depth-of-field”.  I will let you search “depth of field” in your favorite search engine. There are thousands of examples on the net explaining the ins and outs of DoF.

Finally, introducing a light source is often the easiest method to “find” light. Light sources can mean opening a curtain and letting the sun light in, turning on an overhead light, an outdoor spotlight, or using the on-camera flash. Specifically, a flash has a limited range. So you’ll want to take that into consideration. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen at a graduation type of event shooting with their flash at the back of the gymnasium. Of course you can’t stop the ceremony by waving the person down and explaining to them why their photos aren’t exposing correctly.  The flash has a limited distance in which it’s effective to light a subject. So the flash lights up 3 or 4 rows of people’s heads and the stage, your subject, is dark and under-exposed.

So how do you combat these issues. Well, a photographer practices situations (or tries really hard to anticipate and try them) before being in the situation. So practice. It doesn’t have to be hours of practice. Show up early and practice.  You might say, “but if I practice and don’t do it right, I’ll miss those shots, won’t I?”  This might very well be true, but consider, without practice you would have missed them anyway.  Whether it be this, or the next, or the next event, you will get the hang of it and will get those shots that you were missing before.