Last weekend we drove down to South Wales for our niece’s 18th Birthday fancy dress party.
This posed something of a dilemma – should I take the DSLR and flash and get some well-balanced photos of the people there or should I take the Lumix TZ60 to get some fun snaps of the evening recognising that few (if any) would be good enough to add to a portfolio or even put up on my web site or Flickr?
Realising that it was going to be a rowdy night (parties with the Welsh connections usually are), and that I was probably going to be having a beer or three I decided against the expensive camera option and went small, and actually I’m quite glad that I did.
Firstly, it took the pressure off having to get some decent shots, second I didn’t have to worry about kit getting broken (or doused in beer), and thirdly it gave me the chance to play around with the TZ60 in the dark.
As I suspected, getting a well-balanced shot with the built in flash was nearly impossible. If I stood too close the people were over exposed, too far away and they were under exposed. I tried estimating how much to adjust by using exposure compensation but this process just took too long when people were posing for a snap for no more than a few seconds. Of the shots of people, this one of the Birthday Girl was about as good as it got.
But what I do like to do is shoot more abstract images, using the silhouettes of people against the disco lights. This becomes somewhat more hit-and-miss as you can never be sure exactly how the lighting or the poses of the people will work. In the end I took about 175 pictures – sometimes shooting in burst mode and also using the creative filters on the TZ60 – to get the handful of nice images in the gallery below.
What was also handy was that the theme of the week for the Flickr 52 Weeks 2015 Edition challenge was negative space, and the shot at the top of the post fitted in quite well so job done.
