At a recent Birthday party, I encountered one of the most difficult photographic situations I have come across. A very large room and dimly lit room with maybe 20 foot ceilings with black ceiling tiles. Additionally, the minimal light that we did have was tungsten lighting. Bouncing off the ceiling was not an option. The ideal solutions would have either involved placing remote strobes all over the place, or having a moving assistant follow the subject around with a lighting umbrella. Since I have neither an assistant nor an umbrella, this more points out the the problems rather than shows solutions. This is probably why wedding photographers charge so much and produce mediocre results- or why they just don't shoot reception photos. Even some pros could use some Strobist education.
The Above picture partly illustrates one of the problems. You'll notice that the light gets yellower as you get further back. This is because the light from the flash is different the ambient light. I tried to compensate as much as possible by using a CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gel on the face of my flash and setting my camera to compensate by using a Tungsten white balance.
Shooting without flash and available light gave the best color and exposure of the background, but made focusing an issue. It was simply too dark. But even at 1600 iso, the "model" would not sit still enough to capture most images even at 1.8. Using f1.8 contributed to the softer focus. Maybe 1 in 5 or 10 pictures were acceptable this way, depending on distance.
This picture is pretty standard for event photography like this, showing the subject but putting the background completely black since it is beyond the flash's power and range. While there are times that this is desireable, it should be by design and not because of limitations by the photographer and equipment. In many ways, this photo would be perfectly acceptable, except I know that we can do better.
This last photo was only one of a few that came out correctly, mainly because I figured out the solution much too late. By shooting in manual and exposing properly or slightly underexposing for the room, I was able to get the background properly. This would also expose the subject properly in theory, but at that shutter speed there is bound to be movement. The flash more or less froze the subject in that brief 1/2000th of a second that it applied, and the matching color should make it less noticeable.
This photo, while not particularly interesting, also shows proper exposure. Maybe the best way to have done this would have been to find the settings that work on the subject, then slow down the shutter speed until the background works out. Either that or just take a lot of available light pictures and hope a few are good.
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