Help Me Learn to use my Flash!?

I shot an award banquet last night. The room was dark, lit by tungsten ceiling lights with a 12-foot (white panels) ceiling.

So I had the 580 EX II mounted on my 30D, set the 30D to manual. I underexposed for ambient by about 1 stop and then bounced the flash. I had to go to 800 ISO, 1/30 and 2.8 on my 17-55. At times I added 1/3 FEC.

Is there anything different I should have/could have done?

A lot of the images turned out fine...the ambient was reddish of course. Some suffered from a little softness due to motion blur at such a slow shutter speed.

Nic

nicshow wrote in post #7868331
I shot an award banquet last night. The room was dark, lit my tungsten ceiling lights with a 12-foot (white panels) ceiling.

So I had the 580 EX II mounted on my 30D, set the 30D to manual. I underexposed for ambient by about 1 stop and then bounced the flash. I had to go to 800 ISO, 1/30 and 2.8 on my 17-55. At times I added 1/3 FEC.

Is there anything different I should have/could have done?

A lot of the images turned out fine...the ambient was reddish of course. Some suffered from a little softness due to motion blur at such a slow shutter speed.

Nic

try to post some pics of the result you got. that way more members can help you.

Not bad at all...nothing obvious for areas of improvement. Keep doing what you are doing. ETTL makes it easy (compared to the mental gymnastics we used to have to do)

So others often have to shoot at high ISO and low shutter speed in order to bounce flash in these kinds of venues?

Its personal preference, but you can use a CTO gel on the flash, then it will appear closer in colour to the tungsten lighting seen in the first picture. Then you set the white balance to tungsten (shoot raw, tweak in post to taste) which will make things look a bit less orange and more normal...

Well, i say normal, but people usually expect some kinda yellowy light coming from bulbs indoors. So maybe just a 1/2 CTO or 1/4 CTO... your call

You did the right things, although your equation is designed to equalize the ambient with the subject. In some dark banquet halls you might have to underexpose the ambient a bit more to keep your shutter speed within a reasonable speed. Dark backgrounds and bright subjects suck, but its better than getting blurring or ghosting from slow shutter speeds.