Lighting Issues

I am using a Nikon D70 with the speedlight from Nikon. I was taking

pictures at my daughter's Air Force Commissioning inside a

building. I was sitting above the stage not too far back, maybe 20

feet and my photos turned out very dark. All of the blue uniforms

blended in with the darker blue backdrop so that you couldn't

distinguish the colors. Another Mom was taking photos with a larger

digicam and her pictures, although not the best, had better contrast

on the blues. I was using Auto Setting. Do you have any

suggestions as to why this happened? Should I have been using the

portrait setting? I have a son-in-law commissioning in the Spring

and I'd like to correct this problem. Any help or suggestions would

be great appreciated. Thank you.<div></div>

Donna, I open the midtones a little in photoshop,which helped some. It's hard if you do not have a second light to seperate the subject from the background, when they are pretty much the same color.I can't remember if you can shoot in RAW on a D70 , that would help as well.You must be proud of you daughter. Here is my version ....<div></div>

The photo doesn't look that bad on my screen. You have a very dark curtain and dark blue uniforms and they just suck up all the light the flash puts out. Dark backgrounds can do that.

Under the circumstances I think they came out pretty good. Mikes tweeking helped too. Congratulations on the graduation!

 

Ken

Actually, it looks like the exposure is about right. Any more exposure and you'd start to blow out highlights. The reason that the flash system exposes like this is to prevent blowing out the highlights. Your picture is somewhat out of focus too, the AF system probably locked on the flag in the background, and bad focus will also soften the contrast.

 

Attached file only had tweaking of levels, saturation, and unsharp mask in Photoshop Elements, a sub-$100 program.

 

If you get out of the programmed modes, the D70 lets you adjust the contrast in camera. Or if you want to maximize your chances of getting a well adjusted shot, set the camera to RAW and tweak it with a processing program afterwards.

Another note as some advised shooting RAW......don't shoot it in RAW unless you have software that will run it first. Look into the options before you do that.

 

Steve

if you only have picture project and none of the other software,

auto enhance will do the same midtone adjustments in levels of photoshop. BUT make sure you make a copy of the image first.

good luck.

I have a D70 and an SB800, I do not get much distance with it. But I usually have a mini softbox over it. I think the reason why the other woman got a better photo is because she ran a higher or auto ISO. I think if you could look at the EXIF data of her photo it would show probably ISO 500 or so. The D70 is pretty good at higher iso, put Noise Reduction on, I would definitely run it at ISO400 when indoors using a speedlight and some distance from the subject. I sometimes set the flash to TTL-BL and minus down the flash power one click and up the exposure on the camera one click. This will help balance ambient lighting with flash but be careful if people are not still you will get a blur, even with flash. I've never tried auto mode so I'm not sure what the camera selected for an aperture. Would be interesting to see.

I would try and get a bit more light into the camera by opening up the aperture a bit. I think you would be fine in A mode 5.6 - 8.0 when 20 feet away ISO400 and only a single row of people. Dont be afraid of ISO 400, it's a Nikon!

Remember, when using flash, a larger aperture will help with brightness especially with a TTL flash is maxed out, shutter speed will balance the ambient light. TTL-BL kind of does this for you automagically but it sometimes goes a bit overboard :-)

 

GL

There's some misinformation in the previous post. But some good suggestions too.

 

Noise reduction only works in the D70 on slower shutter speeds (or so the manual says). One second and slower, if I recall correctly. So that's not an issue for what you are doing.

 

In addition to more "reach", another advantage of ISO 400 vs. ISO 200 is that the flash will recycle more quickly. You'd probably find the noise from ISO 400 acceptable - but that would be because the camera has a decent sensor, not because the camera is a Nikon. It's actually someone like Sony that makes the sensor.

 

But if I'm shooting flash and not trying to do anything with ambient light, I'd prefer to shoot with ISO 200. You get a little more flexibility when enlarging and cropping. And noise appears most in dark areas and there's a lot of dark area here.

 

On the back of the SB-800 is a distance scale that shows the range for which the flash is effective. Since your photo was at f/4.5 already, it probably won't open too much wider. But there doesn't seem to be any problem with the flash underexposing here, so that's not an issue.

 

As for software, I noticed you have Photoshop 7.0. I don't recall if 7.0 had Camera RAW capability but I suspect it won't handle D70 files. Adobe Photoshop Elements (under $100) will be very familiar as most of the menus and shortcut keys are the same. I'm not sure about the upgrade requirements if you want to go all the way to Photoshop CS 2 (aka Photoshop 9.0), but Adobe customer support will be very helpful if you give them a call.

 

Despite all the technical advice people are throwing at you, just using the camera in Auto all the time isn't terrible. It will usually pick something reasonable.

 

By the way, the camera did use a soft contrast curve for this picture. But again, that's the best result for this subject matter and is just an example of the camera doing something reasonable when in Auto mode.

P.S. Can you tell us a little more about which lens you have? And if you upload the other Mom's photos, we might be able to give a little more detail about how to make the camera give you stuff like that.