Lighting a conference room

I will often light a conference room when the ISO needs to stay low. A few years ago, I owned the Nikon D2X camera. With this camera, most people felt comfortable shooting up to ISO 800 with little noise, but above that was a concern.

While I could have shot these photos with the room light, you would have to consider a few things. First of all, mixed lighting. While the lights in the room with fluorescent, the room also had a large window where some daylight was spilling in.

The easiest solution for me was to overpower the room lights just a little and clean up the color.

I put the lights down to 1/8 power to ensure the flashes would make all fire. I didn’t want to put a radio remote on every morning. So I have a PocketWizard Plus II receiver on one light while triggering it with the PocketWizard Plus II transmitter. If I put the lights to the lowest setting, they do not always fire.

I was pleased overall with the results with g d skins tones and colors throughout the photo. The s was important because I wanted to show the diversity in the classroom, and if not careful, some of the people would have been just a silhouette rather than seeing the skin tones we do here.

Lighting African American on black background

This is one of my favorite photos that I have ever made. I think the model brought as much to this session as I did lighting her.

I love her hair, the turtle neck and her wonderful skin and smile.

Simplicity is what makes this work so well.  You need to have the background far away from the soft boxes.  There is easily 10 feet from the model to the background.  So the amount of light hitting the subject drops off pretty quickly and what little light is hitting the background isn’t enough to register in the photo.

She is around f/8 on the Mamiya RZ 6×7 camera system. I was using a 100-200mm zoom lens and shooting with Provia 100 transparency film.  I didn’t know how good it was until I got the film back from the lab a day or so later.

Sure I shot a test shot. I shot that with a Polaroid back using Fuji’s Polaroid film.