Peenie Wallie

While the vehicle displays were interesting, the most interesting challenge was to photograph dancers, especially in the low-light of dusk and night time. When the camera was set to auto, the shutter speed was usually 1/60 of a second. This produced some relatively sharp photos, but as Scott Kelby wrote in The Digital Photography Book (Volume 1, p. 46):

There's a problem with taking photos of people dancing. If you shoot them with a flash (and most likely you will), it will freeze their movement, so they'll look like they're just standing still, but in somewhat awkward poses. It still amazes me how people doing a line dance can be pictured as people in a police lineup -- the camera just doesn't capture motion, until you tell it to. There are really two techniques: the first is in the camera. It's called panning, where you take the camera and follow the movement of one of the people dancing (usually the bride, groom, a bridesmaid, or a groomsman), while using a slow shutter speed so the rest of the people have a motion blur, which makes them look like (you guessed it) they're dancing. If you didn't remember to employ this technique during your reception shoot, then you can add this motion blur in Photoshop.

Even knowing this at the time, and trying to avoid making this very mistake, I wasn't successful in getting the effect I wanted.

Experimenting with shutter speeds from 1/25 to 1/50 of a second produced photos that were darker and/or too blurry. After I remembered to adjust the ISO and aperture, I was able to produce some better looking pictures. Some of the photos not included here could be improved with a little post-production work, but I really won't have the time to do that in the near future.

My technical skills (or more accurately, lack thereof) aside, the most challenging aspect was to focus on the most photogenic dancers in the crowd, while other people are constantly moving in and out of the frame.