House Interior Lighting Exercise
I've been working on learning how to light things with off camera strobes lately, and I was asked by someone to photograph their living room for them.
For this picture, I first found the correct exposure without a flash was with f11 at a shutter speed of 1/30 second and an ISO of 200 to record the light coming through the windows correctly.
Once I determined that, I turned on the two flashes (one in a softbox on the left out of camera view, and one shooting through an umbrella on the right out of camera view) and set the shutter speed to 1/180 sec so that the only ambient light in the picture would be from the two windows. I used the pop up flash on my D90 to trigger the two strobes using Nikon's Creative Lighting System and the TTL setting. Basically, I wanted the ambient light from the window with the illumination from the two strobes lighting the room. One thing I learned is that for even lighting it would be much better to use two softboxes rather than a softbox and a shoot through umbrella. If you look at the floor on the left, the light is much stronger than the light from the umbrella on the right. I would have been better off with balanced light sources. Of course, the best solution would have been a giant softbox in the center of the room, out of camera view, shooting down and illuminating everything evenly. Or several large skylights on a cloudy day. Not in the budget.
The strobist.com group on Flickr is a wonderful source for technical information on using off camera flash.
Sorry if all the tech stuff is boring.
House Interior Lighting Exercise
I've been working on learning how to light things with off camera strobes lately, and I was asked by someone to photograph their living room for them.
For this picture, I first found the correct exposure without a flash was with f11 at a shutter speed of 1/30 second and an ISO of 200 to record the light coming through the windows correctly.
Once I determined that, I turned on the two flashes (one in a softbox on the left out of camera view, and one shooting through an umbrella on the right out of camera view) and set the shutter speed to 1/180 sec so that the only ambient light in the picture would be from the two windows. I used the pop up flash on my D90 to trigger the two strobes using Nikon's Creative Lighting System and the TTL setting. Basically, I wanted the ambient light from the window with the illumination from the two strobes lighting the room. One thing I learned is that for even lighting it would be much better to use two softboxes rather than a softbox and a shoot through umbrella. If you look at the floor on the left, the light is much stronger than the light from the umbrella on the right. I would have been better off with balanced light sources. Of course, the best solution would have been a giant softbox in the center of the room, out of camera view, shooting down and illuminating everything evenly. Or several large skylights on a cloudy day. Not in the budget.
The strobist.com group on Flickr is a wonderful source for technical information on using off camera flash.
Sorry if all the tech stuff is boring.