Indoor Photography Without Flash

"Zeus"

Canon 5D MarkII

Focal Length 35

Aperture 4

Shutter 1/30

ISO 1250

This is a picture of my dog laying on the couch.  In a situation like this I find that it is good to shoot with a lower color temperature (cooler).  This photo was shot at 3200 (kelvin).  The color temperature is labeled as white balance in reference to the Canon 5D Mark II, and for virtually every digital camera out there.  Truthfully, I've never seen it labeled as anything else.  If you chose to use a higher numbered (warmer) color temperature the scene would have more of a yellowish tint to it.  One instance however where a very high color temperature would benefit the photographer would be if you wanted to desaturate the photo and turn it black and white.  Higher color temperatures seem to bring out more detail when they are later converted to black and white.

For this photo no flash was used.  I would recommend using a flash if you have one at your disposal, but if not, following these below listed steps should serve as a good guide.

First off, I shot this photo at a 1/30, which increases the chance of motion blur.  Given the above listed settings that I used to shoot my photo, I could of easily bumped my ISO up to around 2000 and sped up my shutter to 1/60 or faster.  Another nice feature of many Canon lenses is their image stabilization feature, which serves to minimize camera shake and motion blur.  This should be switched off if you are using a tripod however because without any camera shake the lens/camera gets confused.  If I was using a flash I would have been able to shoot at 1/60 or faster while bringing the exposure (ISO) to a significantly slower (lower numbered/finer grain) setting.  As you can see though, the Mark II shoots excellent shots with very little grain even at traditionally high ISO's.

For this shot I used Zeus's eyes as a focal point, a technique which works excellent for portraits along with a wide aperture.