Has anyone had this experience, and what might be done to correct it?
I'm interested only with the issue of the natural light which enters the room and creates a bright haze around the windows.
The room was quite dark with dark but very reflective wood. The only natural light was coming through the windows behind the desk. The result as you can see is this light contamination causing a blown out haze around the window and onto the curtains and desk. I have added two photos to show that this occurred with both a lighter and a darker exposure.
I thought perhaps I could change to a very fast exposure by changing the ISO, reducing the haze, but this didn't work. I fiddled with the final photo but it was far from ideal.
Does anyone have any tips for avoiding this problem?
Mike,
There are two ways to fix this, either change your exposure or shoot it at a different time of day. It's being caused by the brightness outside the windows. Depending on how bright it is, you may have to shoot it at ISO 64 and speed 1/8000 (I'm a Nikon shooter so this is the base ISO for the D810). Looking at your EXIF data it looks like you are shooting between 1/4 and 1 second. Depending on the need I could easily see you having to be 1/125 of a second. Going this speed will require you to shoot with lighting bring out the detail in the room and not have the rest look dark. Interiors can be hard with daytime shoots and require you to expose for the outside and light for the interior.
Hope this helps.
Reagan
Thanks for the response. We decided against speed lights as the wood was very reflective, causing problems for us with just the interior lights.
The third option is using exposure fusion, aka LR/Enfuse.
Theory: This bloom is the result of your sensor not being able to capture the dynamic range of the scene all in one photo. By bracketing your composition and enfusing, you're able to create a tone mapped image with a much larger dynamic range without bloom.
Practice: Bracket 5 photos in two stop increments. Ideally the darkest exposure shouldn't clip the highlights and the brightest shouldn't clip in the blacks. Pull up the middle exposure in LR and adjust the slides to taste, then sync that setting to all other bracketed photos. Run it through LR/Enfuse and the final image should greatly kill the bloom.
Hope this helps!
Thanks E Port, we did bracket the exposures. Each of them had the same problem, so merging them in a program wasn't able to correct the issue. Even the darkest image had this problem. I will have to go back and try your other suggestions.
Thanks Rajeev. I have a wide angle which makes this a little difficult as filter adapters seem to be less than stellar on a wide lens. I will have to get an adapter and give this a try.
Yeah...It looks like your darkest exposure is only -2 EV. Might have to push further to get the best results.
Along with 5 brackets and exposure fusion, you should also put a polarizer on the lens. And a different angle to shoot (if possible).
One solution would be to scrim the windows either by closing the curtains (if possible) or using a dark cloth of your own. This would get rid of the haze around the desk, and then you could blend the windows in. Removing light by flagging it out of the image can be as or more important than adding light to a scene.
Lighting wise, there are a couple options to try. Lighting the desk area with a softbox could do the trick, and then blend that exposure in with the ambient exposure you have at the bottom. Lighting glossy wood is all about finding the right angle, so you just have to mess with it.
Sometimes you need to aim your light off to the side of the target area, so you're feathering the light onto the area you want it, rather than directly hitting it.
If that's not working, you could do some light painting on the desk and curtains, so you can blend that over the hazy areas.
If you aren't using supplemental lighting, you're probably screwed in a room like this and outside light that bright. Either use lights or come back after sunset. Or scrim like Adam said, but if you're not willing to put in the work with speedlights, you probably aren't willing to take the time to scrim either.
We had speedlights but didn't use them in this room for the reasons previously stated.
I agree with Adam Milton & Jeff Morris. The only way to shoot this room, especially at this time of day is to scrim the windows on the outside and use supplemental lighting. To avoid, or minimize, the reflection of your flash on the wood I would use a single flash and do light painting. With all of the detail in the wood trim I really doubt you could avoid reflections using multiple flashes and trying to capture in in one scene. Once you are finished with the light painting open all of the exposures in PS and use layer masks to use the best parts of each layer.
Ever think of shooting sunrise/sunset? I do a great deal of HDR/speedlighting and found this issue to be a real pain.Suggestions: change composition/altitude. My issue happened at a shoot early in the morning as I thought Id capture first light, but, by te tiem I shot the room, the sun was too bright and it looked like crap. So, I changed angle and used one speedlight against the sun. The result: eh..Grade: C+
We shot during the time the agent was available, so we weren't able to choose the time of day, unfortunately.
Thanks everyone (but one) for your comments.
You could have manually blended an ambient only shot with a flashed shot of the window area.