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Scott Hargis    says:

I've gotten some inquiries about techniques for lighting interiors with off-camera flash, and so last week I took a few minutes and "deconstructed" a shoot. Here are the components that went into the final product for this living room. I chose this room not for it's beauty but because in this case each light is doing a very discrete job with very little overlap, and because there is almost no ambient being used at all, which is rather unusual. My goal, which I did NOT achieve in this case, is to create the impression that the shot is made entirely with ambient, with appropriate shadows behind objects, etc. Still, this is a good example for light placement.

Here is the room shot entirely with ambient: (1/125, f/8 -- to kill the hotspot coming in from the small window behind the lamp)


The first step was to get a main light positioned and see where the shadows remained. I put a speedlight to my left and slightly behind me, aimed straight up at the high ceiling. Wow! Big difference:


There's still a dark shadowy area behind the chimney, along the staircase. So a light goes there, about 1/8 power, on a short stand, with a home-made diffuser cap made from a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Note that it's on the second flight of stairs behind the railings. Otherwise I'd have crazy railing shadows everywhere. It's aimed up and into the back of the chimney, so that I have a fairly large light source bouncing back onto the visible rear wall behind the railing. Unless it's absolutely necessary, I never aim the flash directly at the subject; it nearly always gets bounced off of something! Here's the shot with 2 lights at work, our ceiling bounce and the behind-the-chimney bounce:


Ok, getting better. At the top of the stairs though, we can see just a little of the second floor, and it's pretty dark and scary up there. So another light goes inside one of the bedrooms, where the light can bounce off the door and brighten up the hallway walls and the ceiling. I gelled this one CTO in this setup shot so you can find where I'm talking about easier:


Finally, I turn on the on-camera strobe (sacrilege, I know), at 1/2 or 1/4 power, with diffuser cap. This fills in all the little nooks and crannies and helps define the objects in the room. In this final result, I've also run tweaked the color balance, and tweaked levels to punch up the blacks.


What I dislike about this image is the "flat" quality of the light. If I had it to do over, I would have added a fifth light, camera left, and broken my rule of "no direct flash", aiming it into the room at maybe 1/8 or 1/4, to help define the furniture better, especially the coffee table. You can also see artifacts from my on-camera light on the white door in the rear right corner of the room. This is from reflections off of the plasma TV screen. So it goes.

Hope this is helpful!
Originally posted at 9:55PM, 15 April 2007 PDT (permalink)
Nionyn_ edited this topic 11 months ago.