I believe there is some software that will automatically smoothly
adjust the lighting. I've seen some cheap virtual tours that were done
well enough and cheap enough that they wouldn't be profitable unless a
computer were hired rather than a person. Quite likely, software will
eventually replace a lot of lighting.
I had been using up to a half dozen T32s with optical slaves. I had
also been using 3200K filters on them. However the optical slaves
weren't reliable enough, so I bit the bullet and replaced them with
old Quantum strobes and RF slaves. I recently put 3200K filters on
the quantum strobes just in time to go to a house having halogen
lighting. The halogen appears to be in the middle between the 6200K
strobe and the 3200K incandescent. Just to add to the pressure of the
job, the seller told the agent that he hired her because of the
pictures I took of a townhome. He also had a masters of fine arts in
photography and was earning a living doing artwork/images for video
games. Fortunately he seems to be happy even though the lighting
outdoors for his tiny yard was terrible.
Umbrellas ... you must live in a country where the rooms are big
enough that you can't reach across the room. Space and having light to
reflect, is the problem when trying to use reflectors especially
indoors in a non-studio situation. Barebulb and adjustable reflectors
on the strobe have been the best option I've found.
There were some tutorials which someone had posted an indirect link to
and after finding them I had posted a direct link to them.
(betterphotography?) They had some very impressive outdoor and indoor
portraits of individuals using reflectors. The reflectors were often
6 ft tall and would require both an assistant and calm weather with
little wind.
It seems like every house I go to has at least a few shots that
require putting a strobe in a "distant" room so that there won't be a
dark cave visible in the image. Lighting the main room is always the
bigger problem. Having a strobe on either side of the camera is a
quick way to control shadows. Normally there will be either a dark end
of the room needing light or an area at a very different color
temperature. That is where most of the time is spent.
I've thought about replacing light bulbs with strobes but there seem
to be too many issues ... limited flash adjustability, liability for
broken lamps, still needing almost as much extra lighting. Keeping the
strobes out of the picture often limits what can be done to light the
dark spots though.
I've got to become proficient at stacking layers and creating gradient
masks. Playing with strobes is more fun though. It's much like my
pfreference for a shift lens over perspective correction in photoshop.
Given enough pixels, anything can be done on a computer.
(Moose's rollover didn't work for me using either Opera nor IE but ok
in mozilla)
-jeff
On 11/9/06, AG Schnozz <agschnozz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Back to the interior lighting madness--I usually like to use no
> more than two umbrella-equipped lights. Any more than that and
> things start to lose their mood. I've also used screw-in flash
> units that replace regular light-fixture bulbs with flash. It
> is so important to balance indoor lighting with the window
> lighting. Having the outdoors about 1-stop overexposed is very
> desirable. However, with digital, I find it so easy to take two
> exposures--one for the windows, one for the interior and just
> stack them in an editor. This way, you can also go to tungsten
> lighting. I actually prefer to use tungsten lighting instead of
> flash because you can use the regular interior lighting without
> getting mixed colorcasts. It's easy with digital to
> colorcorrect the WB of each individual shot before the merge.
> Oh, with tungsten lighting it's much easier to see what is going
> on with shadows and even lighting as you set the lights up. It
> takes a whole lot less time than taking flash-meter readings
> over and over and over again. Bounce the tungstens into the
> reflectors just like you do with studio flash units. I also use
> a lot of ceiling bounce. If you angle the lights just right you
> can throw the light to the far end of the room without screwing
> up your front-to-back lighting ratios.
>
> AG
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