Shooting indoors is quite tricky for a beginner photographer, a lot depends on technique here. Any professional will tell you that there’s nothing to do indoors without a good camera, a light zoom and an external flash if the sunlight comes in only on holidays and not at all when you need to take pictures. However, this does not detract from the importance of mastering the technique itself, and if you calculate the expenses (camera from $3000, zoom-glass from $1000, flash from $500), you get a sum that makes you think… at the very least that you will still need to master the technique. Let’s try to figure out what you can do, what you can replace in this expensive scheme, using what we have from the beginning.

What a photographer should not do indoors

First of all, you have to keep in mind the horrible shooting conditions: there is much less light indoors than outdoors, which inevitably leads us to the use of flash, which a beginner tends to turn on the TTL mode, that the ISO value should be set as low as possible. As a result, you get a “stunning” shot with his face against a black (or very close to it) environment, to which the flash just did not get, and if there were objects closer, they are overlit. This is actually the position from which we’re going to go.

Background is a very important detail

In fact, any indoor photography is all about brinkmanship between motion blur and high digital noise. If you think the main thing in photography is the subject, you’re wrong. It’s just a chip on a field that consists of the background (foreground, background, middle ground), and if the background is zero (it’s black), the subject also becomes zero. So we try to get the background, trying to distract from making it interesting for now.

Once in a dark room, we first increase the shutter speed to the limit at which we can shoot without blurring – usually this is the inverse of the lens focal length used, you can go a little longer if you are confident in your hands. It is up to you what mode to choose – shutter speed priority or aperture (to control the depth of field), but you need to keep your hand on the pulse of the control of the shutter speed itself.

Accordingly, if the shutter speed is not reduced (Lo flashes in the viewfinder at the spot of the aperture) and there is nowhere to open the aperture, we start using the third exposure parameter, matrix sensitivity. Doubling the sensitivity gives us a one step gain (possibility to halve the exposure time) and we can play with sensors of modern cameras for a long time.

Don’t take noise into account

Photographers are used to grain, just as our eye is used to it when looking at printed photos. The modern “affordable” camera, regardless of the manufacturer, generates noise in the range from “good” to “quite tolerable” up to the ISO 1600 bar, and the resolution allows it to be further reduced to reasonable values when printing even large formats. You don’t have to worry about it for the Internet at all (a bold statement, which is only the result of omitting some caveats).

However, one should not treat the noise too freely – this is an extreme, which is necessary to go to, no more than that. If it is possible to reduce the sensitivity, do not miss such chances (not at the sacrifice of the above, of course).

Pay attention to noise in post-processing – shoot indoors in RAW, process in Lightroom (with a lot of noise the slider for color noise is set to 50, for light noise very carefully, no more than 30, which is a lot, just to bring the picture noise to a nice look, but not to plastic). That way it will be easier to squeeze the most out of the picture.

Flash and how to use it correctly

The flash in the room is not the main light, but an auxiliary. It should fill in the shadows, make it stand out from the background and light it up a bit, or else the photo will be indistinct. In principle, you can use it as a direct shot on the ceiling, but this is usually too extreme, and you can’t always guess with the walls and ceilings, and then you can spend a lot of time worrying about color temperature because of green/red/blue/yellow walls in different rooms, like in a casino. When ordering a photo shoot in a casino, usually a difficult task, because there is no natural light in the rooms, the design is often in dark colors, and you just think how to arrange everything correctly.

However, you can’t throw this option away either, especially if you use reflectors like 80/20 Lumiquest, a white ceiling (no higher than 4 meters), if you point the flash at it, can become a great source of light. Naturally, if it fills in the shadows under your eyes with success. It is clear that the ceiling should be white, and the walls should aspire to it.

Otherwise, the main flash mode is slow rear-curtain sync. There is no big difference on the curtains at short exposures, but to reinsure and sketch the blur pulse from the flash is still necessary.

In view of the above written that the flash in the room is an auxiliary light, you can try to shoot without it if you meet the above exposure parameters, but you need to watch out for people on a light background.

On the other hand, you should pay attention to the color temperature of the light. This is the aerobatics, but you still need to know the basics. The fact is that of all light sources, only the flash has the most neutral color, close to true daylight – white. All other lights deviate from it – daylight lamps, as they luminescent, can give a reddish or greenish hue, incandescent – yellow. Daylight is also yellowish, and even reddish in the evening. All of this can mix indoors horribly, and then you have a flash: the face will be lit white, but the background, for example, greenish – to fix this lighting in Photoshop can take up to half an hour, if you have the skills. Accordingly, it is easier to prevent the disease than to treat it – to even out the temperature, you need to take a test shot with the white balance set to “flash”, but without the flash, then look at the screen, in what shade the background is colored and add such a filter to the flash. Accordingly, it is a good idea to have a red, green and yellow filter with an effect of not more than a third of a step, i.e. very light. Note, filters take some getting used to.