Flashy pad 5!

Haven't updated the blog for a wee while so I thought I'd add a bit of info about a recent job for a regular client. As it was quite a nice day with some breaks in the cloud I broke out the flashes to keep the windows in check whenever there was blue sky showing. As I've said in previous 'Flashy pad' posts a cloudy day is usually better for interiors but when you get a nice blue sky with white clouds then you can't turn it down.

The shot above was taken using one (I think) flash bounced into the ceiling to light the interior so I could make the exposure for the outside (which was 250th/f9). Without the flash the interior would obviously have been pretty under-exposed. Here's a setup pic from a previous shot showing one flash bouncing off the ceiling and one lower down off the white door for even coverage...




Another space that needed some flash was the top floor which had a nice skyllight and was light and airy. The natural light shot was actually ok but I wanted to pull in the nice sky outside so I set up the flashes. Here's the natural light shot...





Which looks fine, but I really wanted to pull the window in so here's a rough setup shot


And here's the 'final' shot...



Which I do prefer. There's three flashes here by the way, one cam right into the ceiling corner, one cam left handled by me on the stairs (cam triggered with a cable release) and one in the bathroom at the end of the hall.)

I could have used HDR for these shots, as I did in my previous post, but the results, in my opinion, are rarely good enough quality and when the house has so much white to bounce light around I really think doing all this 'in camera' is the way to go whenever possible. I did take an HDR shot of a dining room to compare with doing it in-cam....

First is the natural light shot



Which, again, isn't bad, but I wanted the sky and a little bit more light as I felt this looked a tad dingy, which the room wasn't. So next is the HDR version (9 exposures)



Which loses some sharpness and the colours just don't look right. Then the shot with two flashes...



Which in my opinion looks much better. I was a bit sloppy and got a slight hit on the corner of the mirror but that's user error :)

All in all this was another nice house that I'd love to live in! Here's a few of the detail shots I liked:







And lastly, just to mention the two setup shots I posted (and some shots I stuck on twitter while I was shooting) were taken with the iPhone cam which is pretty good when you have some light. Here's a pic I took of a very brief break in the clouds out of the skylight :)



Which is now my iPhone background :)

Sorry for the longer post (and the dodgy design as my normal blog editor isn't working so using blogger), especially if it's bored you! Just thought I'd share.

Cheers all
Ian :)