Well, it's been a while since the site launched and I haven't had anyone tell me they're interested in blogging here, so I figured I'd kick it off myself.

One of my hobbies is photography, so I decided to write about that. This post will be about taking better photos at dances with a simple point-and-shoot digital camera. It's meant for people that don't know anything technical about photography. If you do know a little about photography this probably won't tell you anything new, but you might like my post about Shooting Girl Jam on my own blog.

The problem

Taking good photos at swing dances is, unfortunately, pretty hard. The places we dance in are often big, dark rooms with lots of quickly moving dancers.

There are two ways people normally try to take photos at dances. The first is without using flash at all. Those pictures usually turn out blurry, like this one:

Why does that happen? The problem is that there's not enough light for your camera to take in, so it has to leave the shutter open longer. That means your photos will be blurry if your hands move (which you can fix with a tripod) or if your subjects move. Since carrying around a tripod is a huge pain and dancers move a lot, you get blurry photos.

The obvious solution is to use your camera's normal flash. This will eliminate the blurriness because the flash only lasts about 1/10000 to 1/1000 of a second. No one moves very much in that amount of time, so everything looks sharp.

The problem with just using the regular flash is that it only lights up whatever is within a couple meters of your camera. Your friends will be sharp, but everything else in the picture fades into inky blackness and the photos all end up looking pretty much the same, like this one:

They're sharp, but the background looks dark and there are a lot of ugly shadows around everyone. What can we do to make it better?

The solution

There's a simple way to help fix both of those problems. It won't make everything perfect, but it will help a lot more than you might expect.

The trick is to use both a slow shutter speed and the flash. You can do this by looking for something called "slow sync flash" or "night portrait" mode on your camera. Every camera maker calls is something different, so if you can't find it post a comment here and I'll look it up for you.

Here's what happens when you use this feature:

Magic! Your friends are fairly sharp and you can still see the surroundings! How does this work? The flash lights up everything close to you (your friends) and does so in a really short burst of light, which makes them appear sharp.

After the flash finishes the camera keeps the shutter open and the rest of the light in the room trickles in and fills in the rest of the picture. The parts of the picture not lit by the flash will still be blurry if your hands shake, but since your subjects are sharp that doesn't really matter so much.

I hope this helped! If you have any questions feel free to post a comment or email me and I'll try to help out. Now get out there, take some pictures, and post them to flickr!