Here is a photoset from the Saturday night goatrance party at the WUK in Vienna. The party was Finstere Zeiten. I’ve posted some of the best photos here with direct links to them in the set. You can comment on individual pictures over at the photosite.
Here is a pair of almost identical pictures, one shot with flash and one without.
Normally I work with no flash, but I have become very tired of the constantly blurred nightclub pictures from small cameras. On the other hand, those phony looking overlit flash pictures that even photographers create don’t do much for me either. The task: how to get decent pictures in a nightclub without lighting the whole place.
At the Sargfabrik goa party, Pascal had a good suggestion: make the person stop dancing. I will work with that again and my fast lenses. But I wasn’t crazy about the look of a static dancer either. Infrared flash with an autofocus lens would solve a lot of the problems.
I have now got an infrared flash to go along with my camera so I thought I would use it for focus as I have found it hard to focus accurately manually in the dark nightclubs with my 50mm F1.4 and F2 lenses. I don’t have any fast autofocus lenses so I was using the 18-55mm F3.5 to 4.5 kit lens for these experiments.
So the goal was to compare what I can do with a flash to what I can do with existing light. Here is another almost direct comparison.
Here are a couple more shot without flash.
Yet using RAW files it appears possible to tame a flash – and get a certain softness out of it – even creating a mysterious deep black background yet with higlights and texture. All the pictures to follow are with flash.
One can certainly do much better with focus with an infrared beam and autolenses. I’ve seen people attach micro flashlights to their rigs for to similar effect.
These guys brought a lot of life to the party.
The girl on the left below was amazing. I caught her at a quiet moment here but most of the night she was right in the middle of the party dancing using both wheels and arms. I didn’t have my camera out at that point.
Keep on dancing!