A place to sit

Having spent some time photographing bullocks (yes, you read that right) on Saturday evening, it was time to relax in the living room in Murragh.  As I sat watching cricket on the armchair in the corner, I eyed up the 2-seater sofa, sitting where it always sits, with the lit table lamp alongside, and the picture on the wall above it, and thought it could make a good exercise in lighting.

The challenge was to photograph the scene as my eye was seeing it – and that meant taking a delicate approach with the lighting.   If I didn’t use any artificial light sources, and left the camera meter the scene, it would do a bad job of comprimising between the lit table lamp and the relatively dark areas on the left.  If I exposed manually for the table lamp, the couch would be black.  If I exposed manually for the couch, the table lamp would go pure white.  Basically, the dynamic range of the scene was too high.

I could have gone all digital and taken a HDR shot – this is where you take multiple exposures at different shutter speeds, and merge them later in post-processing.  I’ve dabbled in that once before, but it’s a bit tedious, gives fake-looking results, and to be honest lets the computer do most of the fun stuff.

The other way of compressing the dynamic range of a scene is to add light to the dark areas, and so bring the artificially-lit areas of the image closer to the already-lit areas (in this case the table lamp).

So I needed to light the sofa, and to some extent the wall behind it.  First step was to expose for the table lamp, with it about a stop and a half below white, to mimic what my eye was seeing – it wasn’t dazzling, but gave a nice warm soft glow.  That base exposure sets my shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

Next I placed an SB-800 on a lightstand to my left, with a shoot through umbrella, and tweaked the power with some test shots to get a look I liked.  Finally I placed an SB-600 on the floor in front of the camera, and having first tried to use it bare, ended up also firing it through a shoot through umbrella to give a little extra light on the front of the couch.

The end result is nothing special – in fact it’s probably quite a boring image – but it was interesting (and educational) to pre-visualize a shot and see if I could create it.  And this photograph is pretty much what I had in mind.

I finished just as my brother arrived in looking for me to shoot the assignment I referred to yesterday, but more on that tomorrow.