Gymnastics Birthday Party

I am so lucky to have a great friend who lets me come along to her events and take pictures. Its wonderful practice for me and I get to spend time around some great kids. This past Sunday I got to attend her son's 6th birthday party (and my own older 2 kids got to go too and had a BLAST) at a place called Regal Gymnastics in Winooski, VT. The lighting was poor in the gymnastics area and my external flash has not been cooperating lately so I had to rely on the built-in flash which is so-so and also my "skillz" with the ISO/Aperture/Shutter/White Balance/Light Metering.

At first my flash was working just fine, but after taking about 20 pictures in a row and saving them in RAW format it suddenly started to say "BUSY DAMMIT" and wouldn't take pictures anymore. This is my worst nightmare. Luckily it was not something I was getting paid to do but I am a perfectionist and a control freak, remember? If I closed the flash and opened it again real quick it would work again but it kept happening. So with a sigh I turned the ISO up to 1600 (the highest my camera would go) and put the shutter at 1/100 and the f-stop at 5.6. This only really seems to spell one thing with me: NOISE. I don't know if I am doing something wrong or what. I had to have a fast shutter speed as it was GYMNASTICS and these were all 6-10 year olds high on sugar. Anything less than 1/100 was not worth taking.

At first I kept it in RAW and each photo looked fine on the screen. But when I started to run out of disk space I dropped it to JPG. In retrospect I wish I had just had it on JPG the entire time. I used Lightroom to edit and fixing the luminance/color noise does not look right when you export into a JPG file which is what I end up having to do. The ones I took in JPG were easier to edit and looked exactly the same when I exported them from my external drive to my hard drive for uploading purposes. I need to do some more research into why it is soooo grainy and if there really is no other alternative than to get a new external flash. The one I have is not fully compatible with my camera as it is an older Speedlite made for a SLR, not a DSLR.

Here are a few shots from the party:

Update: While working on the indoor shots in Lightroom I decided to click on the "HSL" section which is Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. Using these three groups of color controls combined with the Contrast slider I found I was able to produce MUCH more desirable results. Now I want to go back to some older pics and see if I can fix them also. Its such a learning process.

The top pic was before I used the HSL controls:

Note the skin tone is greenish and the red blocks are orangey. Couldn't get rid of it with saturation removal alone...

Now she looks a little more natural and less zombie-like! Still darker than I would want but hey what are ya gonna do...