Overall the Christmas Party shoot at the weekend went quite well, I took some good shots, the boss was generally pleased with what I did and the feedback has been positive from everyone who has seen the pics. The boss can’t complain anyway since he wasn’t paying me to do it!

 

As with most things in life though you need to learn from the experience in order to do it better next time and so here is what I have learned:

• Looking back at the shots it was obvious that I concentrated on taking shots of people who were being active. That’s a reasonable thing to do but quite a few people were happy to just sit at the tables having a chat or to stand around and have a drink. At a work’s party such as this I need to make sure that I get a good shot of everyone regardless of whether they are being the life of the party or not.

• I needed to take more shots of the actual venue and decorations to show everyone the hard work that the organisers had put into making the event so enjoyable. I concentrated on the people and forgot to look at where we actually were.
• My Nikon D80 is not up to the job in low light, but I already knew that. Many shots had to be taken at ISO 800 or even 1000 which on the D80 produces images with an unacceptable amount of noise.

• My Nikon SB400 Speedlight flash is not good enough for this sort of situation, it can only bounce the flash in one direction and is simply not powerful enough to bounce off high ceilings in a large room.
• As in nearly all situations my Nikon 50mm f1.8 is a cut above the rest of my lenses and should be used as much as possible.

Hopefully I will get asked to do the next event too so that I can apply these lessons, although there will be nothing I can do about the equipment I use unless I win the lottery. Enjoy the pics, it was a great night!