Night Time

Shooting events at night can be hard. Depending on the movement of dancers, you need shutter speeds in the 1/250th range. If you are not using flash, and like most events at night are shooting in low light, that means you have to shoot with a fast lens (aperture of f2.8 or faster) and/or a High ISO. In this photo, I was shooting at ISO 1600 at f2.8. This ensured the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze these dancers, who were moving quite fast. Now depending on your camera, you may introduce a lot of noise at ISO 1600. My Canon Eos 20d is quite good and even at ISO 1600 the noise is acceptable. I also ran this photo through a third party software that reduces noise further. I bought Neat Image (software name) which is a photoshop plugin a long time ago. There is also Noise Ninja and a bunch of others. Photoshop also has a noise reduction feature.

Now Noise is caused by a couple of things. First, your camera sensor has noise. This is exacerbated by longer exposures, or multiple exposures, which increases the heat of the sensor or having more things on a smaller chip (which is why a digital SLR will generally have less noise than a point and shoot digital camera). The second thing is your ISO Think of ISO (for this example) like the volume on your stereo. With the volume lower, you can't hear noise coming from your speakers. But crank the volume up enough and you start to hear a hiss through your speakers. And just like speakers, some cameras handle higher ISO better than others. So get to know the limitations of your camera.