Advice: photographing dimly lit indoor events

mutamist · 24-03-2007, 12:21 PM

My old camera, HP R817, had a shooting mode called 'Theatre' which was great for taking photos indoors at dimly lit venues - concerts, shows, wrestlng shows (yes, I go to those!) etc.. Being a novice I'm don't know too much about this mode apart from that it didn't use the flash and took much better pictures in these dimly lit situations than any other mode, and any other camera I've had. The resulting photo would be almost 'through my eyes' in look, where as other shootig modes and cameras gave me much darker photos.

I still have this camera but I have also recently bought a Panasonic DMC-TZ1 and would like to use this. However, photos I've taken in dim light with the TZ1 have been very dark and I've even gone back to using the old camera for such situations and that can't be right.

So, I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on how to get the best use out of my new camera in these situations without going back to the R817 and it's seemingly unbeatable Theatre mode.

many thanks for any advice

Steve

Brammers · 24-03-2007, 3:30 PM

Settings for dimly lit work like this would be:

ISO - as high as it goes.
Aparture - as wide as it goes (a low number - 2.8 is wider than 4)
Shutter speed - hope it's high enough!
Flash - off

I'm not sure what shooting modes your camera has, but you should be able to set ISO independantly at least. If you have an Aparture priority mode (marked A or Av) change to that and set the aparture as wide as possible.

If you only have a program mode, see if you can dial in a couple of stops of underexposure. This often doesn't make the picture too dark, but be careful

A final useful setting would be spot metering, but it's generally reserved for fairly advanced cameras.

Brammers · 24-03-2007, 3:34 PM

A quick PS - many cameras like this have zooms that change their maximum aparture throughout the range - that is to say they can let more light in at the wide end than at the telephoto end. In this case it may be counterproductive to zoom all the way in!

Yours is in this case - its zoom range is 2.8/4.2. It can let in over 2x as much light zoomed out as it can zoomed in.

When you zoom, be very careful that the smallest number you can go to doesn't get to 4.2, which is probably too dark! Try zooming half way, which should get you f3.5 - quite acceptable