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 
Beautiful shots and i think this Venetian blinds-like effect works nicely! 👏😘
it can give a film noir feeling and there is even a way of photoshopping ‘venetian blinds’ into photos :()
It does indeed… and yes it can be photoshopped, but nothing like the ‘real’ thing! 😘
It was never a problem in the days of the old fashioned incandescent bulbs but modern LED and fluorescent lights flicker. That’s why I try to keep some incandescent light bulbs around. I suspect that it’s also connected to how the sensor in a digital camera records the image because I don’t remember it being a problem in the film era. The only issue I remember was strange colour casts with some fluorescent lights because they have, or had in those days, a discontinuous spectrum. Which meant film recorded the colour of the light differently than the human eye saw it.
especially grateful for this informative feedback David and yes the lighting is modern LED energy saving
Thank you for posting this information. I’m inspired to seek out a similar experience in order to teach my eyes to see these shadows. I’m thinking about doing a comparison of setting the shutter speeds, 1/60 and 1/125 with a manual setting and then repeating with the camera set on aperture.
Yes I made these shots mainly to look at shadows but in the process came across the horizontals! I’ll be interested to see your outcomes
It might be strange but I like the effect. Interesting series of shots.
I thought so too Robin – a welcome imperfection