Advice please - dance competition in table tennis "hut"

On Saturday this weekend I have to shoot a small dance competition - just a bit of fun - for my tennis club's xmas do. I attended the first rehearsal a couple of weeks ago and took this picture, which shows the venue quite well....

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I think the stands and so forth are out. Just not appropriate unless you're going to turn this into a major photography event.

I think the first thing you need to work out is how you're going to get proper exposure as the subject-flash distance changes.The two obvious (to me) options are ETTL or manual + EC in the form of FEC, ISO or aperture adjustment. The latter would mean you needed to learn the compensation from near to far and keep using it. Sounds like too much work to me! I would personally go ETTL because I'm not so experienced.

Moving on to making the light more interesting, I think you're looking at OCF but without E-TTL triggers you run into the distance thing again. I shot some roller derby a few weeks ago with strobes, and even though the lights were pretty far away (the distance roughly doubled as the skaters went around the track) there was still huge light fall-off. In your case the distance could triple or quadruple; that's unmanageable in my opinion without some automatic compensation. And even with that, it will still be painfully obvious when the flash is very close to the dancers.

If I were shooting, I would try ETTL triggers (I have PWs) with a flash (maybe two) mounted at the top of one wall, but I would be ready to just go with hotshoe/bounced ETTL if it didn't work out.

For static portions of the evening you could certainly go with manual flash, of course.

Thanks for the reply. You've echoed some of the concerns that have been going through my head.

The only way I can get off camera ETTL is by using one 580EX as a master and one as a slave. Ideally I think I'd like cross lighting, with one flash in the background to provide a rim light and one off camera beside me as the main, but that leaves a lot for my main flash to do and, of course, other than with a short OC-3 cable, that's going to leave my main light firmly attached to the camera and with a long way to go in order to light the judges' table at the far end. Plus I've never personally used such a setup and don't know if I can successfully turn theory into practice on the night.

I think I may have to settle for sharp and well exposed, but ultimately boring lighting, given the limitations/constraint​s I have. I do have the opportunity to attend the rehearsal, three hours before the live event, so I'll probably end up fiddling about to see what I can get away with. Thanks again.

Background rim light plus bounced ETTL might not be that bad. The rim light could be wireless ETTL or manual with radio triggers. Where would you place it, in the peak of one gable end?

I'd try bouncing sideways and slightly upward, with a flag to keep the direct flash out of the spectators' eyes.

Yikes.. Tungsten, florescent, and strobe.. WB should be interesting to say the least.

I would concentrate on the couples, probably from waist up, maybe even tighter. That's not exactly a nice victorian ballroom background, so I'd be using a tele lens (thinking 135L, maybe 70-200) and hope to blur out most of the background.. I also wouldn't bounce off the ceiling.. you need some areas of darkness / shadow to add interest / drama.. bouncing is seeming to give you too even of a light with this small space.. I'd forget ETTL, and go OCF entirely. I'd try a shoot through umbrella in one corner, high up, angled down at the center of the dance floor, maybe 1/3-1/2 power.. and see how that looks.. you might consider adding another shoot through in one of the corners aimed at the middle of the floor, chest/head level, and at maybe 1/3 or 1/2 of whatever power you set the first flash at, to act as fill.

I think I would set it up on one and and shoot mostly from the same end with a flash on your camera bounced. You could then use the inversesquare law to your advantage. Your on camera flash would light those close to you and the OFC would light the people further way.

You could also use it from time to time for rim light...

As you can see, there is very little height to the ceiling, and the hanging room lights add to the risk of casting odd shadows if I don't watch it. My idea was, taking my shooting position as it is for the shot above, with me in the near right corner and shooting across the room from right to left, that the backlight would go in the far right corner, so not firing straight into the lens. For the main light, on camera, I may as well go with the setup in the photo above, bouncing off the ceiling and using a small fill card to throw light forward and not waste it behind me, or have light bouncing strongly off the green walls.

The backlight would be ineffective/redundant for the judging panel, as it would miss them completely, and I might have to switch from high bounced flash to long throw bounced/direct flash to reach the judges from my shooting position. At least I might get some decent light for the dancers and the judges will just have to be grateful for whatever I can manage. As I said, it's all just for fun, so anything that can deliver results above a point and shoot will be welcomed.

Here's my current thinking....

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Thanks for the additional replies. The room lights will all be on, as far as I know, with no creative lighting (e.g. spots) other than whatever I can drum up with my flashes. I can easily suppress the room lights with exposure settings and let the flashes do more of the work. For the image above I was about 2/3 stop under for the ambient so the flash only needed to provide a small top-up.

I do plan to use my 5D2 for this and will have a 24-70/2.8 and 70-200/2.8 to hand. I do have a 135/2 as well, but I think that risks being too limited on focal length and I'd be worried about lack of DOF if I opened wide and had to squeeze in a pair of dancers at fairly close range.

I guess I'm going to be winging it quite a bit, one way and another. Thank God there is a rehearsal beforehand.

Actually, I've just had an idea to swap positions with the backlight, so I'm near the judges and I probably have less variation in subject distance between the dancers and the judges. That way I can still benefit from the backlight for the dancers, but the throw of my main light (bounced) will have a much easier time of it to cover judges and dancers alike. I'll also be in a better position to capture the faces of the dancers during interview if/when they inevitably turn away from the audience and towards the judges.

Thoughts?

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Well the deed is done and I thought I'd share the final setup and results in case it helps anyone else.

Here's a pretty reasonable idea of the room layout. You can see my backlight/slashlight in the top right of the picture. I've moved only a little out of my base position, which was also on the right, in a gap in the seating. The backlight was set to 1/16 -2/3 and 50mm, fired manually with RF-602 triggers. Even that was a tad hot, but I needed to be able to cover a broad area of dancefloor, so it was a judgement call to figure out where my best sweet spot should be in terms of light strength..

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I think you did really well! Picking nits, maybe you could have dialed in a bit of negative FEC to enhance the side lighting, but the pics are well exposed, sharp, and nicely color balanced.

So were you bouncing the on camera flash into the ceiling?

bdillon wrote in post #13541760
So were you bouncing the on camera flash into the ceiling?

Yes. The ceiling was a sort of mid brown colour, the most OFF white I've ever seen. That meant it was draining a lot of power from my bounce and warming the light too. I had to go to 800 ISO at f/2.8 in order to get fast enough recycle times, get the reach I needed for the far end of the room and not overheat the flash. For most of the pictures the WB ended up at 5000K in Lightroom, although a few were better at 4800K or thereabouts and a couple needed more like 5200K.

Here's the setup at the business end of things....

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AntonLargiader wrote in post #13540708
I think you did really well! Picking nits, maybe you could have dialed in a bit of negative FEC to enhance the side lighting, but the pics are well exposed, sharp, and nicely color balanced.

Thanks. I've been caught out in the past with Canon's flash system insisting on underexposing the subject. For this event I varied FEC between 0 and +2/3, depending on the tone of the outfits and scene overall. +2/3 was my default, dropping back if the darker tones were causing overexposure. At times I split the difference.

I think I got a little caught out when shooting back towards the judges. Of course the ETTL pre-flash would not register the output from my remote light, so when they were combined for the shot things were a little bright and needed pulling back. Still, I was checking the histogram and blinkies to make sure that I was doing a decent enough job of exposing to the right and not losing precious highlights, so it was very much a case of making aesthetic corrections rather than salvage efforts on a marginal image.

fantastic job. I would definitely recommend using a gel in the future to reduce the color temperature differences between the ambient and your OCF.

aside from that, you've got it nailed. Nice job