Lowest light levels you encounter?

I'm a professional corporate event shooter. Also do occasional Mitzvahs and weddings. Two years ago I switched back to 35mm format from Micro Four Thirds after shooting the latter format exclusively for 7 years, simply because of the bat-cave lighting conditions I sometimes encounter. Now that I don't need to use flash as much, I often find myself shooting at ISO 12,800-25,600 and f1.4-2.0. (Thank you, DxO for making this possible!). The Edison Ballroom in NYC is probably the dimmest venue in which I work. It's one of the reasons why I shoot bright primes on three cameras rather than using something more convenient but less bright, such as Tamron's or Samyang's 35-150/2.0-2.8.

How about you? What are the most challenging lighting conditions you encounter at events, and how do you deal with them?

Let's get some practical problem-solving conversations started on this forum. New wedding/event shooters welcome.

Last Christmas I shot a corporate party in the ballroom of a posh hotel in London. About 100 people: tuxedos and evening gowns (it was an investment bank's party).

It started out being lit by chandeliers, about 20ft over the tables, and I was shooting ISO 10,000 and up, f/1.4 and f/2.8 with the 70-200, and then they lit the candles on the tables and turned out the overhead lights! (there were still, very dim, uplights on the walls, so people could still see where they were going). From then on was f/1.4 all the way (35mm lens only), as slow as 1/15 (if they weren't moving), and ISO 51200 for the rest of the night. Processing all that noise out in Topaz Photo AI was tedious, but absolutely necessary.

They had a team-building dance-off thing on the dance floor, and for that I had two speedlights high up on stands in the corners (quite far away). Dropped my ISO to a "mere" 10,000, to mix strobe and ambient, and to get a decent shutter speed. Still had to run them through the good de-noiser :-)

OMG. No flash?

I recommend DxO's DeepPRIME. My M1 Mac mini processes a 42MP RAW in just 10 seconds, and it's a one-click batch operation.

dance school concerts are just terrible. i gave up selling images from them years ago. i shoot the full dress rehearsals just for fun and edit a few images for the concert advertising. shooting video is so much easier. same went from m43 to sony ff a7r2 and now a74. cant really get any better low low performing cameras.

Oops sorry saw this as a heading and should not have posted!

Danny.

What's terrible about dance school concerts?
I don't understand your last sentence.

the terrible lighting ,reds , dark blues no spots or white lights on anything.

Ah, well, the light is SUPPOSED to be colored, so I don't do any "correction", just set WB to daylight and let the colors be what they are.

Very saturated LED lights can cause single-channel clipping that's hideous, so if those lights are present, I dial in -2EV to protect the highlights, then brighten in post. An ISO-invariant camera like my a7RIII eliminates any noise penalty from operating this way.