By Ken Hubbard
On a recent trip to Cape May, NJ I wanted to get some interior images of the local church with my Tamron SP AF10-24mm Ultra wide lens. When shooting from the altar back towards the front door I ran into the common problem of very bright daylight coming in through the stained glass windows and door. With such strong backlight coming through the windows, it is very difficult to get a good exposure of the windows and any foreground subjects. As seen in this first image, the interior of the church is very dark, when exposing for the window. One way to solve this is using a flash to balance out the light.
In this second image, I used the pop up flash on my camera to help balance out the light and get a somewhat good exposure. Even though this image is a little bit better, I was still unhappy with a few things. First, I have a hot spot on the rows of benches right in front of me, this was caused by the flash shooting directly forward and hitting there first. Second, you can also see how narrow a field of light was given off by the pop up flash, the image gets darker soon after the hot area right in front of the camera.
In this third image I used a shoe mounted flash angled towards the ceiling of the church, bouncing the light off the ceiling. This created a softer light that spread across the interior equally, creating an image that is nicely lit. Since the ceiling was a warm off-white color, the light reflected off the ceiling was the same nice warm color.
Order of second & third images, as presneted, seems to be out of sync with the order in which they were described.
Posted by: parv | Tuesday, June 08, 2010 at 11:06 PM
I disagree with the above post - but then again - I am an amateur photographer. But - I have used my flash to bounce of light ceilings indoors and I achieve similar (definitely not as professional) results as the third pic. If I use the built in flash -I usually get that annoying hotspot flash.
Posted by: Christine | Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 10:56 PM
What flash did you use? Was it a Quantum, as other flashes don't have a very high guide number.
Posted by: Dick Wood | Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 09:26 AM
Christine - When the Original blog was posted the 2nd and third images were out of order, they were corrected after Parv's post
Posted by: Ken | Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 09:51 AM
Dick - I used a Metz 58 AF-1
Posted by: Ken | Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 09:53 AM