St Patrick's Day at the Scranton Cultural Center

I was asked to shoot an Irish step dancing school at the parade, and then at their post parade show at this beautiful facility in Scranton PA. My experience in low light photography is mostly with sports, so I had a bit of a struggle with myself to back off the exposure enough to allow the ambient light to work into the shots. I started out with an off camera flash, eliminating the ambient all together- Didn't like those at all- no character. I then removed the flash and relied on all ambient- I was in Manual, but it was interesting to note that judging by the camera's meter and histogram, I was well underexposing these shots- in hindsight, I assume that was the dark background that too up so much of the frame. Towards the end, I popped the flash back on, gelled it green, and let it fill some in. I was experimenting with the WB as well- flash, auto, and tungsten were all in the mix at some point, but since I was shooting RAW, I was not to concerned about where it was in camera. Some samples for C&C-

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With stages you'll always be fighting clutter. The female violinist has cool color, light and expression. The mike in the way of her hand is less ideal. Nice expression in number three but I would try to adjust the face a little less exposed and the blacks in the dress a little less dense. Adjustment/shadow highlight in PS works really well doing this if the file is raw.

Thanks for the input! The mic was a big hassle- I was pretty stuck in my place, I needed her to take about 1/2 of a step forward to avoid that, but it didn't happen.

I think the original trouble on #3 is the flash- either too much/ungelled or both. They are in RAW, so I can work that a bit in post.

Thanks again!

What setup were you using?

These were shot with a 5D2, and the 85mm 1.8 lens. As I recall, the lens was wide open. Some shots were all ambient, some others had varying degrees of a 580 ex2 flash, the better results came when that flash was feathered, gelled green, and set to FEC -1. I tried to set it so the flash did not cast its own shadow- just provided some fill.