Light up a big room

Hello,

I placed this on the lighting forum, but maybe somebody on this one has done this, or can help.....

Hope you all can help me this morning. I have been asked by a friend, to shoot some advertizment type pictures of her "kids gym" It's a storefront building about 60'x60'. They want picthres of the kids doing various activities, but on a wide angle, showing as much as possible in each shot.

It is lit with regular floresent lights, and I need to light it up. Anyone have any idea what I could rent, and how much light I would need, to be able to get some good shots in there?

All your ideas are appreciated.....

thanks
m~

--
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about!
Photo Gallery @ http://www.Digitalmike.smugmug.com

One of the problems you will face if you try to just augment the existing light is uneven color temps from your new source and the florescents which are typically greenish. You can use gels to correct but this will cost a lot of light. My suggestion if the room logistics allow for it is to place a few big studio flashes with softboxes or huge umbrellas so the light bounces and diffuses in the room.

The amount of light you need to do this can vary wildly depending on how you can arrange lights. If you can use the lights more directly on specific areas you can get by with less but if you need to illuminate the whole space with one setup it can be much higher. Are there even white walls to bounce off or are they all painted colors that will add their own cast?

You can do it with studio lights, but if the children are moving you will have to use a fast sync speed, depends on your camera.

Could you not shoot it in stages to create a panarama effect?

over lap each section by 60% and use say 2 studio strobes with octo bank diffusers.

Alternatively shoot S3 pro at 1600 ISO turn off the ambient light or replace it with a daylight bulb.

Or shoot the room empty on a long exposure and then shoot the individual areas again from the same perspective, lighting just the children and montage them in.

That's the best of my solutions, I hope 1 inspires you.

Regards Rob

Absolutely. Thanks for the ideas. I'll be trying several things this week to see which works best for my and my budget......

thanks
--
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about!
Photo Gallery @ http://www.Digitalmike.smugmug.com

When I have had to shoot children in a similar setting, I have used my
Q Flash. Due to the round head I get great coverage.
Keith
--
Do, or do not. There is not try!

Try to rent some plexiglas strobe globes. Basically they're made of the same material that a light table is, and shaped like the glass globes in a typical bedroom light but come equipped with a speedring on one end. They're pretty big and give an even omnidirectional light. A few of these out of frame ought to do the trick.

digitalmike said:

Hello,
I placed this on the lighting forum, but maybe somebody on this one
has done this, or can help.....

Hope you all can help me this morning. I have been asked by a
friend, to shoot some advertizment type pictures of her "kids gym"
It's a storefront building about 60'x60'. They want picthres of the
kids doing various activities, but on a wide angle, showing as much
as possible in each shot.

It is lit with regular floresent lights, and I need to light it up.
Anyone have any idea what I could rent, and how much light I would
need, to be able to get some good shots in there?

All your ideas are appreciated.....

thanks
m~

--
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about!
Photo Gallery @ http://www.Digitalmike.smugmug.com

Click to expand...

Thanks,

Any idea where you could rent something like that? All we have around here are Ritz and places like that.

m~
--
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about!
Photo Gallery @ http://www.Digitalmike.smugmug.com

The best thing for you to do is change your clent's expectations. (We'll get to that in a minute)

Are you sure it is 60 x 60, and the whole area must be lit at the same time? That's 3600 square feet, the size of two entire houses with ther inside walls knocked out, and any kids in these pictures will be so small as to be unseeable.

Let's look at light large areas, regardless of the exact size.

What color are the ceilings?

The easiest thing to do is to place high powered studio stobe lights in each corner of the room, mounted on high light stands and pointed directly at the ceiling.

When you take a photo, these (four) lights will go off, hitting the ceiling, diffusing, and bouncing evenly back down over the whole room.

But, like all ceiling lights, they will cast shadows on faces that are looking downwards. So the kids can't be sitting on the floor looking down at toys on the rug.

For your photos, you need to be standing, and the kids need to be looking at things they are holding in their hands, at face level or higher.

We'll do some quick math here.

Four 1000 watt second flash guns, bounced off a 15 foot white ceiling, with ISO 400 film / sensor setting.

Hmmm... you might have f8 all over the room. With four 500 wtt second flashes, that would be f5.6. But these are just mental calculations, and you'll need to actually measure. But they are close enough to real that I can predict the shots will work if the area was 30 x 30 feet.

To cope with the shadows caused by the downward lighting, you need a couple of big umbrellas as far away from the kids as possible, aimed straight (horizontally) into the room.

Light decreases inversely as the square of the distance, which means in English that the farther away the lights are, the less fall off there is. i.e. if the lights are 18 feet from the kids, there will be a one-stop range (half a stop over the kids and half a stop under the kids) from 16 feet in front to 22 feet. That give you a seven foot wide "band" in which you place children so they will be properly exposed by the horizontal lights.

Now, doing the horizontal light math -- f8 x 18 feet equals a guide number of 144, which you can get easily enough from 250 watt seconds per head, from two heads running off a 500 ws power pack, bounced into two big umbrellas.

So in your big space with the high ceilings you've got nice even light over the whole room and decent exposures of he faces of kids from 16 to 22 feet away from the hornizontal lights. You, of course, can be closert to these kids than the lights are. That's four 1000 ws power packs, four heads for them (one each) and a 500 w/s power poack with two heads,a and two big umbrellas.

Are you up to that?

Now, if you can change the clients expectations, so she accepts a number of pictures closer to the kids, each photo featuring some part of her play area, You can easily work with three flash units and some device to set them off at the same time.

Somehow I think you use a modern Canon camera.

Take two light stands, and on each of them mount a Canon flash gun. Place one to theleft of the camera maybe five feet, and the other to the right of the camera, another five feet. Take the third flash unit and mount it on a light stand and take it down the side of the room so that it points are the background, however far away that might me.

Your plan here is to light kids and play area close to the camera, play area far away, and skip lighting all the empty space in between. And if you don't point a flash at the background, first of all it will be too dark, and second of all the fluorescent lights will make it green.

Use iso 400, set the camera on manual, set the shutter speed at 1/60, and measure how far the flash guns are from the kids you want to feature on the play equipment you want to feature.

The flash guns should have indicators that tell you what apertures work for that distance. Again, we want to flash as far away as possible so that the "band" of fall-off is wide enough to light the kids with only one f-stop of falloff from nearest kid to farthest kid. But you want an aperture small enough to give you decent depth of field.

And remember, you can be closer or further than the lights, as long as the lights don't show up inside the frame.

Set the flashes all on E-TTL, and set the camera on an f stop that is wider than the minimum required. i.e. f the flash back says f8 will work, set the camera at f5.6 t give you a little leeway.

At 1/60 and f 5.6 and ISO 400 chances are pretty good the flash will wash out the green cast from the fluorescents. If you slow the shutter speed below that, the fluorescents will start to expose the subjects.

If you've ever wondered why so many restaurant photos have no people in them, it's partly because it is so hard to light a large area evenly.

If she wants pictures with no kids, just set the camera on a tripord and adjust the whie balance. It'll be a longish exposure at a small enough aperture to get eveything sharp. But no kids in a playland is a lousy picture.

BAK

digitalmike, I'm getting the feeling you have taken on a bigger job than you have ever done before. The strobeglobes that nacho mentioned are a type of diffuser that goes over a light source you already have like a studio strobe. If you don't have those and haven't worked with them before I don't suggest learning the ropes while doing a shoot for a paying client. BAK made what is probably a pretty good estimate of how much power you might need. Having sufficiently powerful lights is the most important part followed by having good diffusers. The strobeglobe diffusers sound nice but they are unlikely to be the kind of thing a professional rental place would carry since they sound extremely bulky and somewhat fragile. Umbrellas are cheap and widely available but I doubt if you'll find any professional equipment at Ritz.

See....this is why I love this forum. You can't buy this type of advice. This guy is happy to share his knowledge, and all of it makes perfect sense. I may have bit off more than I can chew, as suggested in a previous post, but I'm doing it on the cheap, to get some experience, help my buddy out, and maybe pick up some pointers along the way.

BAK....all I can say is thanks for the info. If it comes to a shoot, I will let you know how it turned out.

thanks,
m~
--
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about!
Photo Gallery @ http://www.Digitalmike.smugmug.com

Here's a slightly different take on it if you don't want to deal with renting and hauling a lot of gear...

a) if you've got some fast lenses, white balance to fluorescent and shoot all available light. if it's really dark and you've got to work with slow shutter speeds, a bit of panning will lose a bit of the background detail the client wants you to capture, but the tradeoff is a good sense of action that they might well like (and odds are if you're shooting wide, you'll still get a good sense of the space) -

alternately, shooting slow shutter speeds on a tripod can get you a good sense of the space but blur the kids a bit, eliminating needs for pesky model releases for advertising use...

b) shoot slow sync flash with a simple strobe on or off camera- use it to light your main subject, and available light to show your background. if you want, you can put a green fluorescent gel on the flash and white balance to fluorescent to match the available light, or you can just shoot daylight and let the background go greenish (sometimes the color contrast actually works out pretty nicely- i'm a fan of fluorescents...)

happy shooting,
-jj

Thanks for all the excellent advice. I have printed all of this and will study it this weekend.

thanks again
--
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about!
Photo Gallery @ http://www.Digitalmike.smugmug.com