Despite the noisy imperfections of indoor night scenes, I invariably do not resort to flash – not least because I can never handle it well enough to put to good use.
As a result I also found that many of the photos had horizontal Venetian blind-like lines across them. Apparently it’s all to do with shutter speed not matching the A/C phase cycles of artificial lighting and hence freezing part of the cycle (our eyes do not notice the on-off flicker of the light phasing)
<— f2.8; 1/60; iso 250
Recommended solution: Set the shutter speed at 1/50 (1/60 US/Canada) to match the cycle or at twice that 1/100 (1/125)to catch half of the cycle.
If you need to keep the shutter speed above 1/125, use flash which overpowers the artificial light (but keep shutter speed within the flash sync speed 1/200 – 1/250)
For all the gen on light cyles read further:
How to deal with light frequency issue
I did in fact have the speeds set at 1/60 most of the time but since I’m in a 50A/C country I might not have seen the ‘venetian blind effect’ if the shutter speed was set to that or multiples of that – I will retry in future with this speed equation in mind.
Introspectives: thinking out loud with an aim to improve and learn more about photography. Hence the images are not always for show – feedback is welcome.
PoetryPix 