Utopium's Guide To Club Photography

[Utopium]

I've had a bunch of people ask me how I get pictures to look the way they do. I thought I would put together this guide to help explain what I do and give some advice.

DISCLAIMER: I have never taken a photography class or had any other kind of professional training. What is described here is based on my own personal experience. This information is based on MY methods which may not be the RIGHT methods.

This guide describes how to take pictures in clubs and similar environments. Studio, nature, and other kinds of photography are not covered by this.

CAMERA

You don't need a high end digital SLR camera to take good pictures. All that is needed is a camera with the right features. These are:

1. Focus Assist - This is a red or yellow light that is emitted when you press the shutter button half way. It helps to focus the camera in dark places. This is probably the most important feature to have since getting the exposure correct means nothing if the picture comes out blurry.
2. Manual Control - While it is not required, having manual control over the camera settings will certainly help. If a camera has the letters M, A, and S on the mode dial then you know it has manual control.
3. Wide Angle Lens - In a night club things can get pretty cramped. You won't be able to get very far back in a crowd to get pictures of a bunch of people. Having a wide angle lens helps so that you get a wider view at a closer distance. A lens with a equivalent of a 28mm focal length (75 degree angle of view) on the short end should do well.
4. Wide Aperture - A larger aperture means that the camera can gather more light which is very useful in dark environments. A good lens will have a maximum aperture of 2.8 although there are lenses with apertures of 2.0 and even 1.4 available for those who don't mind spending more money.
5. Flash - Every camera except the lowest budget models has a built in flash. It is still worth mentioning that you need one to take pictures in the dark.

You can still take pictures if you don't have one or more of these features, you just will be more limited in the pictures you can take. In terms of the brand of camera to use, it doesn't really matter as long as it has the right features and you are comfortable using it. Don't be fooled by people who claim that you can only get good pictures with a Canon or Nikon camera, there are many other good camera manufacturers out there.

Some things you do NOT need in a camera:

1. High Resolution - Don't buy in to the megapixel myth. My best camera is 5 megapixels. That works just fine for printing 8x10 photos. The pictures I post online from clubs are scaled down to 640x480. If you are buying a new camera and the only difference in features is the number of megapixels, go for the cheaper camera.
2. Ultra Zoom - In a cramped club you really aren't going to be zooming very far without a lot of people in the way. A 10X zoom may be useful for photographing birds outside, but indoors you really won't use the longer focal lengths. Most of my pictures are taken with my lens zoomed all the way out at the widest angle.
3. Accessories - The more stuff you have for your camera means more for you to carry. Having something like a fish eye lens for your camera may be nice for getting some cool pictures, but it's another thing that adds weight and can get broken/stolen when you are out somewhere. Don't even think about bringing a tripod or monopod, that is just begging for someone to trip on it.
4. RAW Mode - Only high end cameras tend to have this. It is a mode which captures the original data from the image sensor without converting it to a JPEG. Files can be between 10 to 20 megabytes each and require the right software to process them after you take the picture. This can be a real pain when taking a lot of pictures.

TAKING PICTURES

This section will deal with how to properly use your camera when taking pictures in a club. One of the most important things to know when taking pictures is to have patience in what you are doing.

FOCUSING

Having a focus assist lamp on your camera helps a lot in dark clubs. This can either be built into the camera itself or on an external flash unit that can communicate with the camera. Some digital SLR cameras that do not have a built in focus assist lamp will sometimes try to focus by "pre-flashing" to illuminate the subject. This usually does not work well and confuses people into thinking you are actually taking the picture. It is best to turn this feature off and either get an external flash unit with a focus assist lamp or just try your best at focusing without assistance.

If you have a focus assist lamp in your camera, it is usually a matter of pointing the camera the direction you want to take the picture. Press the shutter half way down and the focus assist lamp will illuminate the subject with a red or yellow color as it tries to focus. Wait until the image you see through the viewfinder or LCD looks sharp before pressing the shutter button all the way down. If you press the button all the way too quickly, you risk the picture coming out blurry because it didn't obtain a proper focus lock. Some cameras have the ability to prevent a picture from being taken until the focus lock has been confirmed. This may be useful if you have trouble pressing the shutter button the correct way.

For cameras that don't have a focus assist lamp, things get a little more tricky. Most cameras focus using a contrast detection system. This works by looking for lines between light and dark colors on the subject matter. In a dark place, this can be tough to find since the difference in light and dark areas is small. To help get a proper focus, look for spots where you can get as much contrast as possible. Take this image for example:



If you try and focus on the center of the white shirt, then there isn't much difference in the brightness of the area so that the camera can't tell if things look sharp or blurry. If you try and focus on the edge of the shirt where white meets black, the camera will have a better time focusing since it can determine whether the edge of the shirt looks sharp. Some cameras will choose random points to try and focus on. If you are trying to focus on a specific point this can sometimes make things more difficult. I manually tell my camera to focus on the center of the viewfinder, get the focus on a good edge, then move my camera so the image I want to capture is framed properly before taking the picture.

Sometimes things can be too dark to get any kind of focus at all. When this happens, having manual control on a camera will help. Set the camera to aperture priority mode, A on the mode dial, and set the aperture to a narrow value such as 8 or 11. This will increase the depth of field so that things are less likely to become blurry if the right focus isn't obtained. Then just take the shot and hope you are lucky enough that the picture came out okay.

FLASH

Having a flash is very important for taking pictures in the dark. Most cameras have a flash built in so this usually isn't a problem. The use of an external flash can be very helpful in illuminating large areas. Some external flashes have the ability to change the direction they point in order to bounce the light off of another surface. A diffuser can also be attached to make the light look softer. These things can be useful for many situations to make the lighting of a picture look more natural, but in a club it doesn't work out very well. Many clubs have walls and ceilings that are painted black or some other dark color so that any light directed away from what you are photographing will just be absorbed rather than bounce off and filling an area. In situations with large crowds, people around you will also block much of the light from your flash if it is pointed in another direction. Your best bet at getting well lit pictures is to have the flash directed straight forward. This is standard for most cameras with a built in flash that are in a fixed position, but this is something that should be kept in mind with an adjustable external flash.

COLOR

How the camera determines the way colors come out is based on the light source. This is generally referred to as the color temperature. There is a bunch of light physics for how this works, but what it boils down to is the white balance setting on your camera. All cameras have an automatic white balance setting, but it doesn't always work right since peoples skin tones can sometimes come out a little too blue or a little too red. When using a flash, it is pretty safe to set the white balance to a specific value so that colors come out consistent. A setting between 5300K and 5600K, or what is associated with a sunlight icon, is a good balance for flash photography. I have also seen some cameras with a specific white balance setting for flash photography. Not all cameras have the ability to set the white balance manually, but if the pictures come out off balance in automatic mode it is possible to fix it afterwards with the right software.

EXPOSURE

How you set the exposure on a camera will determine how the light being captured looks. The easiest setting is to just put the camera in P or AUTO mode, turn the flash on, and take a picture with the camera doing all of the work. Assuming the camera has been focused correctly, this will result in a clear image of the people you are taking pictures of. It is easy to do and it works.

The thing you will notice about pictures taken with automatic settings like this is that unless the people are near a wall, everything will look completely black around them which can be kinda boring. It would be nice to see more of the background to have a better idea of where people are. This can be done with some manual control.

On the standard P or AUTO mode with the flash on, a camera will usually use a shutter speed between 1/30 and 1/250 of a second. To capture the low light in the background though, a longer shutter speed is required. Some cameras have the option of setting the flash into "slow-synchro" mode which may be labeled as a night scene mode on other cameras. In this mode, the shutter will stay open for up to a full second to gather the light in the background after the flash has gone off to illuminate the primary subject. If a camera doesn't have this specific mode the same function can be performed by putting the camera into the manual exposure mode, M on the mode dial, and setting the exposure time. Make sure you set the aperture to a wide value such as 2.8 or 4.0 so the camera can gather as much light as possible. Shutter speeds between 1/4 second and 1/2 second should be sufficient for capturing background light.

Here is an example of a picture with a long exposure time:



Notice how the lights and the crowd are visible in the background. They look a little blurry because the long exposure time captures their movement, but at least you can see them. On standard P mode you would see almost complete darkness beyond the DJ.

Do not use a long shutter speed if your subject is in motion such as if they are break dancing. If they are moving after the flash goes off and the shutter is still open, lights behind the spot where they were will bleed through if they are no longer blocking that spot. It will look like there are glowing objects on their body that will mess up details.

An important thing to remember when using a long shutter speed: Hold the camera still! You need to wait for the shutter to close before moving the camera, otherwise the image can become blurry and get light trails. It sometimes helps to increase the ISO setting in order to reduce the time the shutter needs to be open. This increases the noise in the image, but it's not that noticeable really. I usually have my camera set to an ISO of 400.

Here is an example of a picture where someone moved the camera before the shutter closed:



Another thing to remember: Do not use a long exposure for subjects that are in bright light! The reason this kind of trick usually works is because it is done in a dark environment. The subject only gets illuminated for a fraction of a second and then goes dark again so they look nice and sharp against the light being gathered in the background. If a person is in bright light though, they will look blurry because the light being reflected was not instantaneous from a flash.

Here is an example of a person who looks blurry because they were in a spotlight:



It may take a bit of practice to be able to take these kinds of pictures, but once you get the hang of it you can get a lot more depth and color added to the pictures you take. It can be useful for other stuff too like capturing glowstick trails. Without a long shutter speed you would just see a piece of plastic in someones hand.



Everything that has been described so far has been for pictures where a flash is used, but it is possible to get some interesting pictures without a flash. This is where a camera with manual control comes in really handy. Capturing pictures in a club where the light is constantly changing can be pretty tricky. You will most likely need to take a picture multiple times before you get one with a good exposure.

Here is one example of a picture without a flash:



Pictures like this will require a long exposure time. There is nothing you can really do about this. The exposure time can be reduced by setting the cameras ISO value as high as possible. Some cameras only go up to 400, others can go as high as 3200. You will get a lot of noise on high ISO images, but it usually is worth it if you capture things properly. Once the ISO has been cranked up, set the camera in aperture priority mode (A on the mode dial) and set the aperture to the lowest number possible. Then try and take a few pictures as the camera tries to determine the proper shutter speed. The exposure may not come out correctly since lights are constantly changing so pictures can come out too dark or too bright. In some cases you may want to go fully manual and set both the aperture and shutter speed values. Either way, you will have to take a few pictures before you get something that looks correct.

Remember, keep the camera as steady as possible! If you move the camera while the shutter is open, the picture will come out blurry from the motion. Below is a link to a good article on keeping a camera stable without a tripod. You might want to ignore the parts on the monopod and rope trick, but the info further down is still handy.

http://www.nicholsonprints.com/Artic...bstitution.htm

POST PROCESSING

After you have taken pictures somewhere, you may just like them as they are directly from the camera and not make any changes. Personally I like to touch them up to make things look better and more clear. You can do this with a variety of different software packages.

Now a lot of people talk about making edits in Adobe Photoshop to make improvements in a picture. Personally, I don't have a copy and wouldn't really know how to use it. I use a variety of other software to edit the pictures I take. For pictures that I take at clubs, I use Picasa. Why Picasa? It may not have all the features that Photoshop does, but the basic things it can do it does very well and it does it FAST! Best of all, Picasa is free so you can download it onto any computer and use it without having to worry about license restrictions.

Picasa can be obtained from this web site: http://picasa.google.com

Once you have Picasa installed it will try and catalog all the pictures on your computer. You may want to cancel this since it can take a while. Picasa has a weird folder management system that can take a while to get used to. Rather than describe how things work with that, I'm just going to say go check out the web site for help. I usually only view one folder at a time by using the "Tools"->"Folder Manager..." menu option. What I describe here is how to process pictures in a specific folder.

When you have copied the pictures from your camera into a folder that is accessible from Picasa, you will see them in a thumbnail view like this:



Click on the first image and Picasa will bring it up in edit mode. This mode allows you to do things such as adjust the contrast, adjust the color temperature, fix red-eye, and peform other image effects. Most of the time you will want to use the "Tuning" tab which gives precise control over the image. Here is one picture that has been untouched from the camera:



Notice how the image is a little dark and the colors are kinda dull. To fix this, simply click on the magic wand button next to the top three sliders. Picasa will make a good guess at adjusting these levels so the image looks brighter and more colorful. It is not always perfect so after you click the magic wand you may want to manually adjust the Fill Light, Highlights, and Shadows sliders so that the picture looks how you want it to. The Color Temperature slider at the bottom is used for making adjustments to the picture when a cameras automatic white balance doesn't work right. If you manually set the white balance on your camera ahead of time then you most likely won't have to touch this. If an automatic white balance was used though and skin tones look a little too blue or too red, then you will want to slide this back and forth until the persons skin tones look natural.

Certain cameras have the ability to detect whether they are being held horizontally or vertically. This information will be embedded into the image and Picasa will rotate it for you automatically so it doesn't look sideways. If your camera doesn't have this feature, you can use the arrows next to the star button displayed under the image to rotate the picture manually.

Sometimes you get pictures that come out slightly blurry but are almost okay. For these slightly blurry pictures, you can fix them by clicking the "Effects" tab and using the "Sharpen" feature. There are other effects and edits you can use under the "Effects" and "Basic Fixes" tabs, but I rarely use them. Feel free to experiment with them if you like. Once you are satisfied with the look of the picture, click on the star button below the image so that you can export the changes later. You can then move back and forth through the rest of the images using the left and right arrows above the picture.

Here are the final results:



This system tends to be a lot faster then using an editor like Photoshop because you are able to move through a folder of images really quickly rather than opening each picture individually and messing around with complicated menus to make changes.

After you have made all the changes to the pictures, go back to the folder view by clicking the "Back To Library" button on the top left. Go to the "Edit" menu and click on "Select Starred" so that only the pictures you want to save the edits for are selected. Then go to the "File" menu and click on "Export Picture To Folder...". In the window that pops up you can specify a new folder to save the pictures to and also have them all resized to a smaller resolution so that they can be posted online. You can also export the pictures as a web page by using the "Folder" -> "Export as Web Page..." menu option. This will create HTML files that will make a gallery of all the pictures. The files can then be uploaded to a web host so that the pictures can be viewed by other people.

Exporting the images may take a minute or two since it is actually applying all the changes you made on the fly. Picasa doesn't actually save the changes to the image itself when you edit them. Instead, it saves the information to a file named "Picasa.ini" in the folder where the pictures are located. The changes are only saved when you export the images to a different folder. This is useful because it preserves the original images in case you want to make changes later.

Once the images are exported, you are then free to do with them what you wish. If you want to know more about using Picasa, there is help on the web site that describes how to use all of the features.

OTHER USEFUL SOFTWARE

Here are other software packages that are useful when processing pictures. All of them are available for free.

GIMP - A free equivalent to Photoshop. GIMP can be used for more detailed manipulation of photos you take.
Noiseware Community Edition - Cleans up noise that shows up in high ISO images.
Easy Thumbnails - When you simply need to resize a large number of images on the fly, this is quick and easy to use.
Raw Therapee - If you take pictures in RAW mode, this is useful for processing those RAW images to get some nice results.
XnView - An image viewing/browsing program with a bunch of useful features.

[vinylbitch]

how generous of you, nat, to take the time for this most informative guide to club photography.

seriously, you fukin rock.

and so do your pix.

[EmmaK]

Awesome Nat. Ideally more people will read through that before taking less than stellar photos. Yours are definitely always flattering.

p.s. You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Utopium again.. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Hmph.

[empath]

This guide is incomplete. I don't see the section on how to get drunk girls to make out for you.

[maynard]

Originally Posted by empath

This guide is incomplete. I don't see the section on how to get drunk girls to make out for you.

It's not like it's difficult. All you need are two drunk girls and a camera.

[EmmaK]

Nat doesn't need those tricks. Ask SSB?

[buster]

wow - thanks for all the info Nat! you should teach Club Photography 101 at college - you have all the material you need.

[jibboo]

Originally Posted by buster

wow - thanks for all the info Nat! you should teach Club Photography 101 at college - you have all the material you need.

can i chaperone the field trips

[EmmaK]

Dirty old man.

[jibboo]

[Utopium]

Originally Posted by buster

wow - thanks for all the info Nat! you should teach Club Photography 101 at college - you have all the material you need.

I wonder if Nation could be kept open for educational reasons?

[chicapony]

Nat! You may be onto something.....maybe buzz could even get govt funding since it would be educational now.....

[Russell Christ]

Yea I definetly dig the pix man

I would love to get back into photography
I only really ever fucked with black and white photos, but I learned hell of a lot of shit!
To tackle color, I feel like that would take time to actually know how I want pictures to turn out while I'm taking them... maybe not.

Either way I always enjoyed photography
YOU GOTTA HAVE THE EYE! and you definetly do man

[The Jezereck]

Thanks man, great job!

[ladymaroo]

excellent pointers, thanks!