Tips for taking Pictures of Shenanigans.

I am the usual designated driver for a group of guys I work with (Military). Being an older NCO with a wife and kids, I like not being hungover in the morning now, and the money I save. Most of the time I'm bored out of my mind sipping diet coke all night at the bar. One night though, I brought my D7000 out with us to take pictures for their facebook pages.

I am a landscape and nature shooter so I'm not very good with "event" type photography. They ended up loving the pictures, just because of the superior image quality, but from a photography standpoint they were pretty horrible. I think what they enjoyed more was the fact that a couple of guys constantly getting their picture taken by a "big" camera (D7k, with grip) attracted all sorts of girls. Needless to say I have been "re-hired" for their upcoming Halloween night bar crawl.

I was wondering if anybody, especially wedding shooters, had any tips they would like to share for bar scene shooting.

Here is what I am working with:

D7000 with Grip.
24-120 f/4
SB-700 On the hot shoe and shot using iTTL mode
RAW format

I do have a 50mm 1.4 I had thrown in my bag, but the bars were awfully packed, and I found it was to much of a hassle to get oriented properly for a good frame with it at times.

Here are a few of the issues I had and was wondering if there were good fixes I'm not thinking of:

• Extremely pale skin tones due to direct flash (Was thinking about picking up some CTO gel would this be advisable?)

• Lack of bounce-able items, I'm a big fan of hitting the corner behind and to my left, but I rarely ever had that option. When I had a low enough ceiling my SB-700 head was pointed straight forward and 45 degrees up. Outside it was all direct. I used the clip on diffuser all night, but found I often still had some really hard shadows. Am I better off going straight up and using the built in bounce card?

• Auto ISO. Should I be using this? Being a landscape guy with my camera for the most part glued to my tripod quick ISO adjustment is rarely needed, but I think it might be helpful in this case.

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Just a simple guy who likes complicated cameras.