Depending on your style an interests as a photographer, party photos may be your favorite gig or your worst nightmare.  

The pros: lots of people, lots of interesting candid moments, energy, activity, good cheer, interesting environment.

Cons: poor lighting, movement, shyness, and Uncle Bob with his new DSLR who wants to follow you around and ask a million questions.

It is definitely a challenging setting, but the potential for great images makes it worthwhile.  Here’s a gallery of shots I took last night, at a surprise birthday party for my girlfriend’s mother.  The party was outside under a tent in the backyard.  The party began in late afternoon and went well into the night.

I already listed general pros and cons above, but lets talk more specifically – it was a sunny day outside, so lots of good light.  Problem is, that good light bounced off the green grass and up under the tent, giving everything a green cast.  Also, the tent naturally kills most of that good sunlight, which is a mixed blessing, as it evens out the dramatic contrast.  I shot everything with my Canon 430EX Speedlite mounted on-camera, with a Sto-Fen diffuser dome on.  Now I’ve made it clear in the past that I hate on-camera lighting, but the circumstances called for it; I was there to enjoy the party, so I didn’t want to spend the whole time messing around with lightstands and umbrellas.  Also, the combination of the Sto-Fen dome and bounce light off the tent ceiling made for a diffused source that didn’t look too bad, and it canceled out the green cast on the subjects (the green cast remains in the BG of course, but who cares – that’s how it looked).

Of course, once the sun went down, and the dancing began outside of the tent, the Sto-Fen went out the window; at that point, I pulled down the wide angle adapter on the Speedlite, which gives me a 14mm spread of light, and switched to direct flash.  Still not my favorite, but I was out of options.  The direct light, with such a wide spread, in E-TTL mode with no exposure compensation is still a direct, on-axis source, but it’s a very wide & somewhat weak source.  Combined with a wide angle lens (Tokina 12-24), I was able to get very close to the subjects.  This means that they’re lit well, but the light falls off very fast, and the BG goes darker – as it should.

This was the perfect chance for me to try a techique that I read about in McNally’s book, and have seen done by National Geographic shooters many times.  To keep some ambient light in the photo (if only in the twilight sky), as well as to capture the energy in the scene, I slowed the shutter speed down to about 1/13 @ f/4, ISO 400.  Without a flash, this would result in a photo too dark to be useful.  Add in the flash, and the near subjects pop back up, and the BG still gets some extra light.  

The slow shutter speed means two things: camera shake (negated by the wide angle), and subject-motion.  In simple terms, as the people move they’re going to blur out.  Enter the flash, which not only lights things, but also freezes them.  The real trick here is to make it look natural.  On the default settings, the shutter opens & the flash fires at the same time – the subjects are frozen, and then for the rest of the exposure, if they move they’ll appear to ghost forward from their flashed position.  This look weird at best, and generally just bad.

Here’s the trick, and it’s pretty simple.  Get into your camera & flash settings, and switch them to “2nd Curtain” mode.  This means that instead of firing when the shutter opens, the flash will fire just before the shutter closes.  With fast shutter speeds, you’ll never notice the difference, but with slow ones, your subjects will ghost along until the flash freezes them at the end.  The resulting effect is much more natural looking, and can give you some very cool effects.

I could have titled this post “Making the Most of Direct Flash at Night.”  Or, for the general point-and-shoot party photographer, “How to make your Facebook photos suck less.”  

Low-light party photos are never going to look like they were shot in the studio.  And if you tried to, you’d ruin that unique party atmostphere.  Far, far better to preserve that atmostphere and struggle along with a single light (although you could move it off-camera if you had an assistant to shuffle it around for you).  Instead of trying to sterilize the scene, work with it – embrace some movement and make the direct flash work for you.