Party help and adice Needed

One of my wife's relatives is having a 60th birthday party next Friday and she has asked me to record the event for her. Its not something that I think she would have hired a professional for and I know she'll be happy with the results however badly I do it! But I would like to do a good job for her and I'm feeling quite confident-ish.

The party is at a large country hotel and will be indoors in the evening in a large room. The place is a fairly classic wedding reception sort of venue. She would like some photos of the room, cake, tables and balloons etc, photos of people arriving in the room and some of people seated at the tables.

I am planning to use my 70D with the 35mm F2 is for shots of people, the 15-85 for shots of the room and also my 50mm 1.8 for details if needed. The room is fairly well lit, but I will need to use a flash. This is where the problems start! I only have a 270EXii which I usually only use for a bit of fill flash outdoors. Although it doesn't swivel it does tilt upwards, but the ceiling is quite high and I fear the poor thing won't have anything like the power required to effectively bounce of the ceiling. I also have a sto-fen diffuser for it and have had some success in the living room using this to point the flash directly at my poor, long suffering wife. Another alternatives are to not use the flash and let the auto iso go up to a reasonable amount (might not be that high shooting at F2.8) or to use the 270EXii off the camera (but that will require waving it above my head in a silly manner and also having the pop-up flash pointing straight at the guests as its needed to command the 270.

I also have to capture some outdoor fireworks that she is having which will be at 10pm (which is about an hour or so after sunset currently in the UK). So any advice you have about taking firework pics when its not too dark would also be helpful.

I'm sorry that this is a bit rambling! Any advice you guys have would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Paul

Forget auto ISO. Raise your ISO up to whatever you are comfortable with so you can balance the flash and ambient to some degree. You wont have to put too much strain on your flash even bouncing off a reasonable ceiling height. As for the oustide fireworks. Use a tripod, use your aperture to control the brightness of the burst, and the shutter speed to control how much ambient you want to capture. Start out with a faily low ISO, 100 or 200. Its much like capturing flash.

In think you will be surprised with the 270's results. A very nice flash. I would not suggest bouncing the flash unless the ceilings are low. Make sure you have plenty of batteries.

Thanks for the advice guys I'll report back on the results.

Oh and thanks to sorpio_e for the prompt to buy more batteries for the flash!

Definitely keep us posted Good luck !!!