The best picture of a gathering is not always the one with everyone looking at you.

Photographs of gatherings tend to be organised around the camera, everyone turned outward and paused. What that records is the interruption rather than the evening. The image people want later is usually the one where nobody noticed: two heads bent together, hands in the middle of a dish, someone laughing at something outside the frame.

Spend part of the evening taking pictures without asking anyone to look. Keep the blurry ones if the feeling survived. Then put the camera down and be present, because a few honest frames are worth more than an album of arranged ones.