I was at a graduation ceremony this weekend (my grilfriend is now a fully accredited teacher of the English language, thank you) in a large auditorium. And, it got pretty easy to tell the veteran shooters apart from the proud parents, and it wasn’t just about lenses big enough to bludgeon a ram to death with. Way too many of the poor parents were making a common DSLR-newbie mistake: they were trusting the auto mode.

Now, don’t get me wrong, most cameras have a fairly sophisticated auto mode, but to get that the engineers had to make a lot of assumptions about shooting conditions, and shooting in an auditorium isn’t really one of the parameters.

The problem ends up being that in an auditorium, which is always horrednously dark by relative light standards (some 10-14 stops darker than daylight), the camera will try to use its popup flash to save the day. What it doesn’t realize, however, in an auditorium is that the subject is much, much farther away than the little flash is meant for. The popup flash on most DSLRs is really not so powerful, designed to go about 20-40 feet roughly. Anything farther way than that, and the flash won’t do you any good at all. And, worse, because it believes it’s doing good with the flash, the camera will pick setting which can actually make your picture across the room worse.

Instead, if you’re new to DSLRs and need to shoot in an auditorium, try this:

1. Set your camera to SHUTTER PRIORITY (S or Tv, depending on your brand). This will let you control how fast your shutter fires, which is important to freezing action.
2. Come to grips right now with the fact that you will have noise in your shots. In a building as dark as most auditoriums there is no way to get good shutter speeds without cranking the ISO up. Admit to yourself right now that the picture is more important than the noise.
3. Set your ISO to auto. We’re going to trust your camera to help chip in and try to keep the ISO as low as it can, but it is programmed to move the ISO up like it should once it needs to. Trust it here.
4. Set your shutter speed t0 1/250. Point the camera at the scene you’ll be photographing, and make sure no values are blinking on the rear of your LCD. If a value is blinking (not changing, but blinking), that means it’s physically impossible, and in our case means we’re trying to shoot to fast. Slowly lower your shutter speed until no values blink.
5. Turn IS or VR on. The speeds you’ll be shooting at are going to be so low your hands will add a lot of potential blur to your shots. Turn IS or VR on to counter for that as much as possible.

There’s a lot more you can do or know about shooting in indoor arenas, but that should get you started. And, don’t trust the popup flash is your subject is going to be more than 30 feet away, you’ll be doing yourself more harm than good.