zarek rahman © 2011
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Problematic ambient lighting and flash

Held at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane, London, the 10th annual British Asian Sports Awards took place on Saturday 5 March 2011 and I was tasked to shoot the VIP drinks reception for Lebara, the primary sponsor for the event. The room was a difficult one to shoot, with every wall covered in mirrors, blue light and even a giant ice sculpture. Keep reading for details or check out the gallery first.

The post I wrote about the baby shower and how to retain ambient light has been one of the more popular ones on my site. I used many of those principles in photographing this drinks reception but with some important changes, which I could only decide upon after looking at the issues I was facing. As usual with these sorts of events, I was shooting with my 24-70mm f2.8 Nikkor and D700 and SB900 flash.

[box_grey]Identifying the problems in the room[/box_grey]

1. The colours. Look at the photos below of the ambient light in the room. It’s a lighting nightmare!! Lebara’s corporate colour is blue, so the room was awash with led lights shooting blue everywhere. There were also tungsten lights in the ceiling which added a warmer yellow mix into the room. When shooting a corporate event I want to portray as much of the company’s image as possible so it was important to keep the blue in all of the photos.

2. Mirrors. Every wall had at least 8 mirrors on it. Nobody wants the photographer to be in the photos, so I had to be mindful of the angle I was shooting. I also had to be careful that my flash wouldn’t be reflected in any of the mirrors.

3. The huge ice sculpture that takes up an entire wall. Ice reflects and bounces off light from a small flash in all kinds of directions. In order to take a decent photo of the sculpture and be able to actually read it, I had to be careful that it was lit evenly and again, not shoot flash directly into it (as with the mirrors).

[box_grey]Retaining the blue light[/box_grey]

No bouncing. The first thing I decided was that I wasn’t going to bounce my flash. But bouncing flash on the wall or a ceiling means a bigger light source which means softer light which means nicer photos!!!! Right??? Well maybe, but it was pretty clear that if I had bounced my flash, the blue light would be gone from wherever I bounced it, and I didn’t want that, because then half the photo would be blue and the other half wouldn’t. So the best option was to use direct flash, with the flash pointing at the subjects, but still slightly off camera.

I knew I wanted to keep TTL functionality on the flash (because I’d be moving around a lot) but I didn’t fancy holding it above my head with one hand and trying to balance the camera and zoom at the same time with the other. I don’t own a dedicated flash bracket, which would have been perfect for this, but luckily I do have an Orbis ring flash bracket (which is way less expensive than a proper one, but obviously it’s not a proper one so it doesn’t rotate or extend).

The Orbis bracket is actually supposed to be used for holding the ring flash in front of the camera and lens, but the way it’s constructed allows you to change this slightly and have the bracket attached to the camera but shifted off to the left rather than in front. I fiddled with it for about 5 minutes before getting the flash into a good position, to the left and slightly above the camera by about 20cm. Just to be clear, I didn’t use the Orbis ring, it was just the bare flash head sitting on the bracket pointed in the same direction as the lens.

No Smurfs. One trick that many photographers use outdoors is to shift the white balance on their cameras to tungsten, which really saturates the sky and makes it into a deep blue colour. The downside of doing this is that any people in the shot will look half dead, and maybe like a Smurf, because their skin won’t have any warmth to it. The solution is to put some CTO (orange) gel onto the flash head, which warms up the light sufficiently to counteract the tungsten white balance setting on the camera.

Luckily for me, the company’s corporate color is blue, and I saw no reason why this trick couldn’t work indoors. I set the white balance accordingly and fired off a few test shots with the ambient light – you can see the results above. I then stuck on the CTO gel and terrorised one of the waiters for a test shot:

She was looking pretty normal, so the only thing left to do was set my camera up for when the guests arrived. I was in manual exposure mode again, with my aperture set at f2.8 to let in as much light as possible, my shutter at 1/100s to freeze the action, and my ISO at 400 to let in a little more ambient blue light than I would have got if I had gone lower. These settings had the background underexposed by around 2 stops.

Next job was to set up the flash to light the guests. Shooting in TTL mode and connected to the camera by a cable, my flash exposure compensation was set to +0.3ev because I wanted the subjects to pop out a little bit, and adding some more light does that. The final thing I did was to zoom the flash head to around 135mm, so that it would only illuminate the center of the image – otherwise the whole room would have been hit with the orange gel.

These were more or less the same settings I used for the rest of the reception, altering my flash exposure compensation only if the blinky highlights on my camera’s LCD were going crazy (i.e. if I was overexposing any particular image). I stayed in the range of -0.7 to +0.7ev overall.

[box_grey]The mirrors[/box_grey]

Pictures of the mirrors. This one was a bit tricky. The organisers really wanted some photos of the mirrors, with the branding on it. Great, how do you take a photo of a mirror without being in it, and without taking it from some bizarre angle?

After some serious head scratching, I remembered that Lightroom has some handy lens distortion correction tools, including one which can change the perspective of an image vertically. I got in front of one of the mirrors and lay down on my back with the camera pointing up, shooting at an angle that would avoid having me in it and also gave a good reflection of the ceiling behind me.

Why did I care about reflecting the ceiling? Because when you light a mirror or any other reflective surface, you tend not to light the surface itself, but what it is reflecting instead. I turned my flash head to hit the ceiling behind me, and I ended up with this:

Looks OK, but obviously not great because it’s slanted. However, a quick fiddle with the vertical slider in the Lens Corrections panel in Lightroom sorted this out immediately:

Not bad, right?

[box_grey]The ice sculpture[/box_grey]

Ice is sort of like glass, in that you can’t light it directly without getting loads of tiny little specular highlights (really bright bits of reflected light) in your image. The best way to do it is to light around it. I didn’t have that luxury here, so I had to make do with the ambient lighting in the room and a high ISO for the establishing shot of the room which you can see below. This photo was taken at f2.8 (to let in light), 1/80 (because my lens didn’t have image stabilisation and I didn’t have a tripod or appropriate surface to sit the camera on) and ISO 3600 (to get a good reading on the exposure meter after setting my aperture and shutter speed).

The high ISO, slow shutter technique works fine when there’s nobody in the room, but not so great if there are people around.

For this very quick shot of the company’s CEO, I had someone hold the flash to camera right, as far as the cable would stretch, and aim the light right at his face. You can still see some specular highlights being reflected in the right of the image.

Given how busy the room was and how little space was available, it’s a fairly good result. The rest of the sculpture doesn’t have highlights because I asked the person holding the flash to flag (block the light) it on the left side with her hand. This stopped any light hitting the rear of it. If I had a grid spot handy, this would have further isolated the light to his face, letting the ambient take care of the sculpture.

[box_grey]Points to note[/box_grey]

• Getting these photos to look this way was really dependent on riding the white balance setting, which I had manually punched in at around 2800k. The CTO gel then fills in the subjects with some orange light to counteract that cold white balance setting, getting them looking alive again.
• I could very well have stuck a small softbox onto my flash head to soften the effects of the naked flash head, which gives off a very hard and usually unflattering light. I chose not to do this though, because having a massive attachment on top of an already massive camera not only intimidates your subject further, but also makes it hard to move around in a crowded room.
• Many people would use a Sto-Fen type dome diffuser on the flash head when using it naked. I don’t really like dome diffusers because they spread the light out everywhere and I was really trying to contain it to the center of the image. Using the dome diffuser would have stopped this.
• Over the course of the reception I found that the better photos in front of the ice were the ones with people, rather than trying to get shots of the sculpture itself. Having someone in the picture takes your eyes off the distracting specular highlights that can appear. When I did want to get a photo of the ice sculpture itself, I used the ambient light only so as not to add more highlights to the image.

[box_grey]Some examples[/box_grey]

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See the rest here

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