Low Light Event Photography

Once a year I shoot an event and this event takes place in a very dark venue and this is due to the choice of lighting they use every year. This event is a black-tie event for charity.

I struggle with choosing what lens to use so I brought my whole bag this year of canon gear. Knowing the lighting situation I didn’t want to limit myself to just one or two lenses because you just never know until you get there. So the lenses I brought were 85mm f1.8, 35mm f2 image stabilized, 70-200 f2.8 ii stabilized and the Rokinon 14mm f2.8. I started out with the 70-200 simply because I just bought it and wanted to try it out. It’s awesome having a good 70-200 again. Then I used the 85mm for a good bit of the night because its a f1.8 which gives me a good amount of light when compared to the f2 and f2.8 that the other lenses are.

There is a choice of color images that I took from the night. ISO varies from iso 4,000-12,800 on the 5d Mark Iv. The shutter was around 1/200th-1/30th so that gives you an idea of how dark it was in this venue. I also had to bump the exposure on almost every image at least 1 stop to 1/2 a stop in Lightroom. I don’t do a lot of post-processing for event photography. I stick to basic contrast, exposure, and highlight adjustments. I add a little bit of sharpening, do some cropping and very little noise reduction. If some images are too bright with color from the lights or grainy I go black and white. Here are some of those images.