I recently went to a one-year-old's birthday party. The event took place inside; there was some light coming through the windows from outside and there was also light from the lightbulbs in the room, although not nearly enough. I used S mode on my Nikon D5100 (with an 18-55 stock lens) in order to reduce blur as much as possible, even though I wasn't able to go too low with the speed given the lighting; I also increased ISO to about 640.
Some of the pictures came out orangey due to the lightbulbs (the white balance was set to incandescent), especially when people were sitting just below the light source, while others came out blurry, despite my effort.
What should I have done better? Would shooting in RAW have helped?
Answer
In a situation like this there is no substitute for a faster lens. Kids are a challenge to photograph at the best of times but with low light you only have two options flash which kids tend to hate or a faster larger aperture lens. Something like an f/1.8 or f/1.4 prime lens aren't too expensive and let in a lot more light than your kit lens which is f/3.5 at best. This allows you to lower the ISO and get faster shutter speeds which is essential for kids because they never keep still.
If you shoot in RAW this will give you the most options for post processing the images when you get them into your computer. With RAW white balance settings do not effect the RAW data at all so you can set the balance later individually on each image.
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