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While covering an Ellen Allien techno concert at B-Side in Coventry, a fellow photographer (didn’t catch his name – but I think he goes to Case) told me about a cool technique he likes to use. The idea is this (for a perfectly dark room with a few small intense but discrete light sources):

• Set your camera to manual exposure
• Set the ISO to 100 for ultimate sharpness
• Set the shutter speed to more than 2 seconds
• Adjust your flashes output manually to get an aperture more than 5.6-ish
• Focus on your subject (and then I usually set it to manual focus so it does not hunt)
• While shooting the picture, optionally purposefully move the camera and then manually fire the flash at your subject

The goal is to either use the available motion in the light sources/subject to create a blurring “light trace” and then to manually fire the flash which you hold in your hand to “stop motion.” If done correctly, the results can be very interesting and beautiful: