Lighting Challenges

So as part of my new position at my company, I have become a go-to person for photography. All kinds of photography, in fact--portraits, PR shots, architectural, you name it. (For the moment, let's leave aside that I haven't done much of the one type of shooting at which I think I am legitimately adequate--documenting the work of teachers and students.)

Last week my company had a Fairly Large Gala (we are a non-profit, after all, so a Big Gala sounds too wasteful...and everything was over by 6:30, so perhaps Gala is even stretching it too far) to celebrate the opening of our new building. We used to toil in converted mill buildings on the Newton banks of the Charles, in a space that had about as much character as rye bread (i.e., none). But now we have a sparkling new space on the other side of the river--granted, in a former Raytheon building--with all new equipment, offices, conference rooms, etc. It's a big step up.

So last week we have a big celebration to formally open the place. The festivities included the dedications of three conference rooms to various VIPs, and for photos of these rooms, they turned to me.

I wanted to do something more elaborate than just a simple photo with available light, but I was limited partly by my equipment (somewhat...more details on that later) and largely by my expertise. How do you light an empty room? And how do you make it look interesting? Definitely a challenge.

One room in particular (the newly named "Wickes Room") was tougher than the others because of the internal and external elements--it had glass and wood on one wall. This meant that I would have to light both the interior and the exterior.

I started by trying to find a perspective I liked. I figured that once I had that, I could piece together some basic lighting and make the space look compelling.

Here it is with minimal lighting--just the interior conference room lights and the indirect natural light coming from outside (there is a big bank of windows just to the right of where I am standing). One immediate problem I noticed is the windows' reflection in the glass of the wall; fixing this required closing all the blinds and blocking any natural light from coming in.

The Wickes Room, as it appeared on Sunday, Jan 22, just 2 hours before the Pats and Ravens kicked off.

From there it was a matter of using my two flashes to light the room. I thought the wood wall was an interesting element, and something that helped identify this room from others on the first floor. So I trained one flash on that wall to give it some definition, and then put the second flash inside the room, pointed at the ceiling. This second light would illuminate the interior.

Anatoly lighting the inside; Butch hitting the wall. Yes--I name my flashes.

Here's where things got more complicated. I thought my setup would work, but I wanted to move Anatoly (my interior flash) behind the door on the left to obscure it from my camera's view. The problem? I was triggering the flashes by infrared beam, and as soon as I put the flash behind the door it was out of the direct line-of-sight of my camera, and wouldn't fire. (I have many, many wasted shots that attest to this.) So after much trial and error I decided that I would have to leave the flash in the frame and then just photoshop it out later. Yuck. (Knowing this, I did try to minimize some potential reflection coming from that flash by blocking some of the light.)

I also warmed up the scene by turning on the globe lights running by the room; it helped to highlight the yellow paint on the walls too.

Final shot as it came out of the camera.

So that's the shot--it took about an hour to figure out, which is probably about 30 minutes longer than it should have. My infrared issues were the toughest to resolve and also required that I spend another hour doing post-processing. The final final is below, flash and reflections removed.

Done.

A passable shot, I think, for never having done any real architectural photography before. The room looks pretty warm, and I think the lights work--especially the highlight on the wood. And people seemed to like it for the 60 seconds that it was displayed onscreen.