Hi,

I just booked a last minute residential shoot for tomorrow afternoon, and my contact sent me a couple test shots (see below) that she did. One is of a dining room with a chandelier and I remembered the problems I have had with these things in the past. I always have trouble lighting rooms like this because no matter where I put the lights I end up creating long shadows off the chandelier.

Are there any tips or tricks to dealing with these things? Thanks very much for any advice.

Cheers,

Andrew

I have very little experience with room lighting but I do work with studio lighting alot. Figuring out lighting problems can be fun, exciting and profitable. If you don't mind I'd like to give you a few ideas that may be useful. Please understand that I don't know what your budget is, how much time you have to complete your assignment, or what equipment you have at your disposal. If I were going to shoot the room from the angle in the photo that you provided, I think I would try using my 4x6 foot softbox mounted horizontaly, directly over camera position. I would either keep it level with the floor or possibly point it down slightly. This way the light will feather along the ceiling and hopefully not make a hot area. Because the light is 6 feet long it should wrap around the chandelier nicely and you should barely notice a shadow. My second choice would probably be two large chinese lanterns, one on each side of the camera, Again, the light should bounce all over the room and any shadows should be very soft if visible at all. If you don't have a really big softbox, or chinese lanterns, you could set up a backdrop stand across the room from camera position and suspend a large section of rip-stop nylon or some other diffusion material. Cut a small hole in the center of the fabric to stick your lens through. Put one flash head with unbrella on either side of the camera so it turns your whole end of the room in to a giant shoot through softbox. Regardless what lighting setup you use from the camera end of the room, I'm sure you'll have some light fall off at the other end of the room. You may want to try putting a barebulb flash at the other end, hidden behind a chair or something so it can't be seen from camera angle. Face the bare bulb at the ceiling and match the output with your softbox. Or, instead of using a bare bulb, you can put you second flash inside a little chinese lantern to give it more even distribution. An empty 1 gallon milk jug might make a decent chinese lantern on the cheap. One final thing you may want to try is to set up large difussion panels outside of those huge doors and blast some soft light through there. I'd keep your outdoor lighting back from the doors so they are not visible from camera view. I noticed thet the exterior is sort of washed out. If it is attractive then i would probably adjust the ambient light down to give the exterior a nicer feel. I hope you get something out if this that may help you. I'd like to see your final results when you are done!
Take care.

No real tricks in my book for this problem. If you light the area that includes the chandelier you're going to cast a shadow--that's a given. However you can control where the shadow falls. If the shadow were to fall towards the windows or the camera there would be no visible shadow. As Dean Collins used to preach "Create a highlight and control a shadow". That's really what photographic lighting is all about.

Thanks very much for the replies. The shoot was for a real estate agent, so it wasn't a big budget job, but for a real estate shoot it wasn't too bad either.

I also couldn't find an assistant on such short notice, so I did it by myself, which limited the amount of equipment I was willing to bring. I don't own any softboxes yet, and normally use large white umbrellas and black cards to control the spill.

I did 11 shots in about 7 hours and have posted the dining room shot below. This was done close to end of the day, so there wasn't too much light coming in the doors on the right. I started by setting up two 8" Smith-Victor round lights with 200W bulbs on camera right to throw some warm light into the room, because the light outside was a very cool blue. The left side of the room was still quite dark, so I set up strobe in a door way on the right side of the room and feathered it toward the back wall. I started with a 1/2 CTO gel, but it was way too warm, so I removed the filter and it looked much better. I guess the strobe was already much warmer than the light outside.

I don't think it's anything special, but the client was very happy with the results.

I also posted a bedroom shot that I'm very happy with, but it required a lot of photoshop layering to blend in the window. I tried lighting this shot with strobe, but the results sucked because I had to light from behind the camera and it just didn't look natural.

I just don't know how you could get a shot like this in one shot when you can't get any lights into the room.

Thanks again for the advice.

Andrew

Nicely done...X2!

Andrew,
Good Work!

I did a real estate job today and let me tell you how lucky you are to have 7 hours to shoot. I had 2 hours to basically document a mansion. Not only was the house huge and had rooms everywhere, the only time they had to available was at 11am this morning when the sun was pouring into the house and windows everywhere looking out to the ocean. The only shots that I didn't have to struggle with were the bathroom shots since they had no windows

I'll be honest I don't know how anybody is making money doing this kind of photography. I live in a rather expensive area of California and when the agent called me to do the job the first thing she said to me is that "They have another photographer who is willing to do the job for $75.00 but wanted someone with a more professional camera to shoot this house" I kid you not that is exactly what she said.

Personally it's way to much work for what these agents are willing to pay, maybe it's different in other parts of the country, but not here.

Anyways just my thoughts after a long day.

Curious what others have experienced in this niche'

Cris...