Photographing Indoors Without Flash

Many interesting places to photograph — museums, restaurants, places of worship — either ban flash or don’t suit it well : flat lighting, reflections on display cases, the atmosphere of the scene completely flattened. Fortunately, a few simple settings are usually enough to do without it entirely.

Raise the sensitivity (ISO) without fear

Raising the ISO remains, in low light, the most direct setting to keep a sufficient shutter speed — modern sensors tolerate much higher values than they did a few years ago without troublesome image degradation. A slightly grainier but sharp photo beats a smooth but blurry one for lack of enough light.

Open the aperture wide

Choosing the widest aperture available on your lens (the smallest f/-number) lets more light reach the sensor, at the cost of a shallower depth of field — generally a favourable trade-off indoors, where a blurred background often even adds interest to the composition.

Stabilise rather than illuminate

Bracing your elbows against your body, leaning against a wall or piece of furniture, or resting the camera on a stable surface (even without a tripod) noticeably reduces the shake responsible for blur in low light. Holding your breath at the moment of shooting, a simple but often forgotten reflex, also makes a real difference at slow shutter speeds.

Compose with the light that’s already there

A low-light location almost always has sources you can work with — accent lighting, a window, a chandelier — rather than trying to evenly light everything. Positioning your subject to benefit from this existing light, rather than fighting it, often produces far more atmospheric images than flat flash lighting ever could.