When Stephen Segal approached me to put the Nikon Z6 mirrorless through its paces, I thought that the various requirements of the day to day creation of media for a hotel, spa, bar and restaurant would be the ideal testing ground.
Everything needs to happen fast, from production to publication. All the deadlines are “last week, Tuesday” and its a myriad of scenarios with various lighting conditions.
So… this is how we do it.
How do you manage really complex lighting?
Your client will often have an interior created and decorated to a very specific them and mood, and will probably have the lighting to match. They did this for a reason!
We all have more than enough lighting gadgets and gizmos to overcome very directional highlights and lack of light (as well as insane ISO’s to handle the darkest corners)… but…
You need to be careful!
Key points:
Look. Really look at what a location looks like!
The challenge to overcome is not always the difficult lighting conditions but recreating the mood and effectively transferring the message your client wants to be felt and understood.
Solution: Cheat… Do whatever you need to do to get the image in as good a quality as possible, and then retouch it to match the look/feel/mood of the location.
Setup:
Work Dirty, GET your shot… Make Sure you have the mood!
The location here is a glass box in the middle of a restaurant. It has the illusion of a lot of light because there are windows all around and many mini-chandeliers hanging from above, but they are all low powered and textured light with the bulk of the light shining straight down from recessed LED downlighters.
Downlighters create a mood light with highlights and deep shadows… a nightmare for your model’s eyes! So we added a silver and gold reflector from two sides to just lift the shadows from the model’s eyes and chin. Then we lifted the model’s face to get as much light as possible into the eye-sockets.
The camera setting was the easiest part. Nikon Z6 set to ISO3200 to ISO4000 f/4.5 on the 24-70 f/4. I was shooting wide open, and trusting my technique (and the Image stabilisation) to give me sharp shots at 1/80th of a second
Pro Tip: Reflectors are your friends. In this case, there was no space for large flash units to be shaped reasonably, and I could push in extra little chunks of light with reflectors both inside and outside the glass-encased space…
Available light = Any light that is available!
Take-away:
The important thing here was to recreate highlights and “light tubes” or cones of light in the final image. Vignettes and highlights are the cheap and nasty way to give the feel of the actual look. Add in deep shadows and voila! Let the viewer’s mind convince them of what they think they are seeing.
Photos do not lie, but Photographers lie often!
