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Phase P30+ Interiors

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Well I was invited as a guest to Seven Canyons Villa's up in the Sedona area which are basically time share units . Well honestly these are much further away than any timeshare unit i ever seen. I would move in in a heart beat to say the least. I have been there before so this time i wanted to try and get something out of it for my book. Like to expand my book a little on the interiors so i dragged myself out of bed at 5 am with my P30+ and 28mm also with my one portable Elinchrom Quadra unit with small soft box for some fill. I shot everything daylight balanced here and than fine tuned in C1 by eye to get the color I wanted. Would have loved another light or three but wanted to try and catch the ambient look to it. Out of about 6 or 7 setups i think I got 4 keepers. All with the 28mm at F16 with 3 to 4 seconds for most of them. Here is what i picked off and spent all morning airbrushing and such. If you hate one let me know. Trying to see if they will work in my book. Word of note I hate TV's in images for this stuff but really no way around it so I put images in them.:D







 

RayM

Member
Guy, First of all, really nice photos. I've looked at them closely, and it took me awhile to identify what was catching my eye about the first one, the living room shot. The light stand looks distorted to me. I bet that was a tough room to shoot. Ray
 

Corlan F.

Subscriber Member
Guy, these are nice as usual. Not to keen on the last one though, but this might be just because you were there... and i wasn't. :eek:

Can you be kind enough to elaborate a little bit on how you used the Quadra "for fill" on 4 seconds shots at f16 for those of us who are not educated with the technique?

(i pretty much shoot with Eli strobes as fast as possible, but that's for product shots -otherwise used to rent continuous lighting (movies equipment) for interiors long exposures... but it was some time ago)
 
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Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Ben think a black border may do it. I really hate TV's . I even thought about shooting a painting at that angle and place it in the space.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Guy, First of all, really nice photos. I've looked at them closely, and it took me awhile to identify what was catching my eye about the first one, the living room shot. The light stand looks distorted to me. I bet that was a tough room to shoot. Ray
Yes pretty tough to shoot . I actually had to put some sky in , was a little late shooing it for a 4 second shot. Now the light stand, not sure I am seeing what you mentioned. Can you point that out and I will do some more work. Thanks BTW all for your comments.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Guy, these are nice as usual. Not to keen on the last one though, but this might be just because you were there... and i wasn't. :eek:

Can you be kind enough to elaborate a little bit on how you used the Quadra "for fill" or 4 seconds shot at f16 for those of us who are not educated with the technique?

(i pretty much shoot with Eli strobes as fast as possible, but that's for product shots -otherwise used to rent continuous lighting (movies equipment) for interiors long exposures... but it was some time ago)
Sure in this case I used a small soft box with a 400 watt strobe and I actually set the camera on daylight even though I am shooting tungsten. Reason being if I set the camera on tungsten and use the flash the flash lighting will look blue which is more stranger than looking warm. So when flash is used set for daylight and let the warm tone of ambient tungsten come in a little. Also daylight from window coming in.
So with this in mind the flash actually is acting more as the main light and fills in where the tungsten is not hitting. In this shot ( the first one let's say) top left ceiling would go very dark . Back of flowers would also with the sofa table so this is more the flash than the ambient filling in those area's. Now it's a balance of not going overboard either way and also not trying to be equal either . Like portraits you want some type of ratio to create shadows and highlights to work with. Great question BTW and working with lighting takes one a load of patience and also to be very knowledgeable of what you are doing with it. I made this shoot even tougher for myself by not tethering to a laptop but working from the LCD screen and histo. This makes the task riskier because obviously much harder to find problem area's
 
D

ddk

Guest
these are very nice Guy, I like them but I have the same nit as everyone else, the images on the tv sets are too distracting. Try leaving them blank and see what happens.
 

RayM

Member
Guy, light table rather than what I originally called a "light stand" (sorry).

The light table in the bottom right of the photo looks like it's being 'stretched' down and to the right. It's the thing in the photo that stands out for me that says 'wide angle lens used.'
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Yea real tough to correct Ray. I will try here in a bit and will try something on TV as well , it's bugging me too. Nice to get the feedback
 

carstenw

Active member
Really nice shots, Guy. As a token European in this thread, I will point out that I think shots 2 and 3 are overlit, and I lose sense of what the rooms would really look like. Shots 1 and 4 look much more natural.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Carsten you hit a subject I was thinking about when I was processing them which led me to go lighter. I agree with you on 2 and 4 and let's say you where over and we had a nice steak dinner and sat there to eat , well obviously it is way to bright for the atmosphere for dining. Here is the issue is the intended audience. Here I have a couple issues . Let's say for a interior designer which in this case they would want to show off the furniture and the design of the room. Case two if it was a home builder they may want to show the openness of a big and bright room. For a architect that designed it he maybe more interested in the atmosphere of the room as being darker but showing his design lines clearly in that contrast of light. Home buyer well that's us. I may want to see the space and you may want to see the atmosphere differently which leads us all down this track we call intended audience.
So now as the shooter what to highlight, what to hide , what strengths you want to bring out and who the heck is going to hire you for what and actually write that check. See this is when photography becomes not yours in my opinion and if you ask commercial shooters about this you will most likely get the same answers. In this case the client may want this look but you as the shooter want the look you described. I see this as the crossroads sometimes and which path to take. Obviously I put this in my book it is for one reason only to sell myself to a client for work and this is the struggle which road to follow or better yet which type of client you are after. But I may just agree with you and bring it a touch down. Interesting though if you sit and think about the intended audience part.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Black lines look to be the answer for the TV. If I had more room in the first image I could possible warp it to fix the table . I got a little but I am pretty darn tight on cropping to about all I could do. Great input everyone and i thank you for the help.
 

vieri

Well-known member
Carsten you hit a subject I was thinking about when I was processing them which led me to go lighter. I agree with you on 2 and 4 and let's say you where over and we had a nice steak dinner and sat there to eat , well obviously it is way to bright for the atmosphere for dining. Here is the issue is the intended audience. Here I have a couple issues . Let's say for a interior designer which in this case they would want to show off the furniture and the design of the room. Case two if it was a home builder they may want to show the openness of a big and bright room. For a architect that designed it he maybe more interested in the atmosphere of the room as being darker but showing his design lines clearly in that contrast of light. Home buyer well that's us. I may want to see the space and you may want to see the atmosphere differently which leads us all down this track we call intended audience.
So now as the shooter what to highlight, what to hide , what strengths you want to bring out and who the heck is going to hire you for what and actually write that check. See this is when photography becomes not yours in my opinion and if you ask commercial shooters about this you will most likely get the same answers. In this case the client may want this look but you as the shooter want the look you described. I see this as the crossroads sometimes and which path to take. Obviously I put this in my book it is for one reason only to sell myself to a client for work and this is the struggle which road to follow or better yet which type of client you are after. But I may just agree with you and bring it a touch down. Interesting though if you sit and think about the intended audience part.
Guy, very good point re: customer happiness & different target audiences. Maybe if you are doing these for a self-promotional publication, I might suggest to include two different versions of the same shot lit in two different ways, with a small explanatory note below telling the why for each lighting. This way you would reach both target audiences, and at the same time show off your abilities to both audiences re: what you are capable to do with the same room & lights. I found this a very good approach and one that brought me unexpected commissions other than the work I was applying for.

Just my .02 of course.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Nice idea Vieri. One thing that would have helped me more at the time of shooting is tethered. I can really fine tune better when I am tethering than working from the LCD. I think we all can and reason many MF companies put a premium on there tethering software. You really have a hard time telling about light output and I don't care how big that LCD is, it is not a easy task compared to tethering. But no excuses. I was doing it before everyone woke up in the house so glad i got a couple winners in the end.
 

vieri

Well-known member
Nice idea Vieri. One thing that would have helped me more at the time of shooting is tethered. I can really fine tune better when I am tethering than working from the LCD. I think we all can and reason many MF companies put a premium on there tethering software. You really have a hard time telling about light output and I don't care how big that LCD is, it is not a easy task compared to tethering. But no excuses. I was doing it before everyone woke up in the house so glad i got a couple winners in the end.
Especially from the frankly abysmal LCD of the P series backs! :ROTFL: I am appalled at the quality of the P45+'s screen in a general way, though I understand the reason for it: the kind of shooting for which it has been designed screams for tethering... I greatly doubt that even an LCD like the D series Nikon, arguably one of the best out there, would make any difference when judging light & details. For those advocating that the histogram is enough, IMHO it might be for general light level understanding, but surely not for the kind of light examination you needed to do there. Histogram generally do no tell you where in the pic is a certain amount of light, and when they do (histogram connected to the zoomed area) it still a huge PITA to judge an image that way - nothing beats a computer screen, possibly a good & calibrated one...

So, overall a great job there Guy! And though I agree with you that different lighting would have better be done at the time of shooting, with these fat files you have lot of room for processing them in two different ways to a degree and create two image with very different feel :D
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Agreed . Honestly I know many moan and groan so much about the LCD but it does not really bug me that much. Sure it does but its just a okay cool next shot please kinda thing. Luckily C1 is killer at tethering
 

vieri

Well-known member
Agreed . Honestly I know many moan and groan so much about the LCD but it does not really bug me that much. Sure it does but its just a okay cool next shot please kinda thing. Luckily C1 is killer at tethering
Which is another question mark re: the S2 - is there any news about if, how and with which software tethering will be possible? I am not sure C1 will support it, it makes sense to do it to sell software, but on the other hand it doesn't make much sense to enable a Phase 645 competitor with such a strong capability... :rolleyes:
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
In C1 we can shoot to a hot folder so the client can see what we're shooting, but that is NOT the same thing as tethered...
 

Christopher

Active member
While talking about the nice Phase screen I thought I show you this nice image. The good thing with these displays is that they are so bad, that the really isn't any difference when they are broken ;-)
 
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