In the living room.
One of the most common situations that the average person may find themselves in when it comes to photography is taking a photo inside the house. It presents a unique challenge especially in daylight, that is fortunately pretty easy to overcome. Imagine you”re the designated photographer at a family gathering. Maybe a kids birthday party or something like that. You know enough to know that using on-camera pop up flash is usually a no-no. You know that window light is great and you’ll use it if you can, but this is meant to be a family get together not a portrait session and it’s simply not possible to photograph everyone using the window light. So what can you do?
A little preparation is in order. As long as you have some means to get a flash off camera, you’ll have all you need to succeed. If possible, shoot a few test shots in the empty room before the guests arrive so you at least have some ballpark numbers to work with. Start off with a photo of the room where you meter for the ambient light inside room. In the example below, I’ve metered the light where the candles on the table are. You’ll immediately notice that the window to the side is incredibly blown out. The settings for this were ISO 800 f.5.6 1/30.
Blown out window
Now compare the above photo to this next one. Here I’ve metered for the outside light. I’ve got my window looking good but the rest of the frame is too dark to be any use. Settings here were ISO 100 f5.6 1/125. That’s a full 5 stops different to the inside light. Anybody who gets photographed in this light is going to be lost in those shadows.
Deep shadows.
It’s obvious that I somehow need to balance that outside light with what’s inside. Doing so is pretty simple and only takes a couple of minutes preparation to get right. I can’t really control the amount of light that’s outside, so I’m going to base my metering around that. Which means I’m going to be shooting at f5.6 1/125 at ISO100 or pretty close to. What I can control however is the light inside the room. For this, I use two Canon speedlights positioned in opposite corners of the room. Farthest away from the window (camera left), I placed a 580EXII. I just put it on top of a shelf in the corner, with the head zoomed to 50mm and pointing at the ceiling. The ceiling height in my living room is approximately 4m (13′). Flash power was set to ¼. On the other side of the room, closer to the window, I had a second speedlight. This had a Stofen diffuser on it and a power setting of 1/16. This second light mainly served to fill in a few shadows around the window.
Balanced light.
And that’s pretty much all you need to do. Set up is quick and easy – meter for the outside light, add a remote flash to bring the inside light up, and if need be, a second flash to fill some shadows. Now you’re free to shoot without needing to worry about blowing out the window or losing people in the shadows.
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