[slinkysteve]

I'm going to see a friends band next week and want to take some pictures of them. Unfortunately the venue is dark, dingy, cramped and has very poor lighting bar the odd direct spot light.

Has anyone got any tips that would help me take decent pictures in this kind of environment?

This isn't the place but its similar in lighting (was taken ages ago with my Sony cybershot)

[VikingPhotography]

1. Shoot in full manual mode, setting the fastest aperture your lens has
2. Learn to trust in and compensate for your camera's AF - MF takes too long
3. Shoot in RAW and set Auto WB - deal with the stage lighting in post
4. Set your ISO accordingly - 400 or so for well-lit venues, 800 or 1600 for the grungy ones!
5. Shutter speeds no lower than 1/60 (wide end) to 1/160 (tele end) will do the job
6. Use fast glass - f/2.8 constant if you have it or, if you have fast primes (f/2 or better) use them for the poorly lit venues
7. Always keep an eye open for what is happening around the stage - the lead singer might be beating away on a tambourine, but the guitaritst might be dropping into a demon-flava solo any second now

I find a good starting point to be ISO400, f/2.8 and 1/125 sec for shutter speed... I'll adjust on the fly from those values as and when needed.

[inventory]

That's good advice, although ISO400 sounds a bit optimistic. I also find Aperture-priority a good way to work, as it can keep up with fast changing lights better than I can. Spot-metering is a must in my opinion, although what you'll probably find is that there's no one correct way to shoot.

I've a fair few gig photos in my profile on here with all the EXIF info intact. If you have a shuffle through those, it should give you some ideas of what typical settings I use.

If you're really struggling for light and you've cleared it with your mates, you may want to try using flash for a few shots.

If you do, a good starting point settings-wise would normally be 1/10sec, ISO800, aperture-wide-open, matrix metering. Dragging the shutter like this will help to produce a decent balance between ambient and flash light. You may wish to experiment with much longer exposures, depending on how much movement you want in your shot.

Hope this helps.

[silver]

the main advice is to have fun,. try out as many different things as you can think of,.

the d50 can handle a lot of under exposure - like 2 stops even at 1600iso and the noise not look objectionable (matter of opinion) and I believe the d40 works in a similar way (though rumour has it the d40 does a better job at 1600 iso raw and then pushed the extra stop in processing to get back 3200iso)

for fast primes (which can help with low lighting conditions) you might want to consider the sigma 1.4 - but tbh throwing money at the problem doesn't make up for creativity - experiment and have fun

Sil

[slinkysteve]

Hey cheers for all the advice, its really appreciated