lighting a hotel rooms

Hello, a friend of mine manages a very little hotel.
She asked me if I can take some pictures of it.
It is a cheap hotel (1 star), so the furniture and interior design is not exactly luxury

I won't get paid for this job (she is a friend and I've not experiences), but it will be nice to make some little experience.
Honestly I am more into portraiture, so I've not a big idea about what's exactly the purpose of lighting a room without any person inside

As far as I can remember it is quite important to balance the light coming through the room windows with the room light, so that both the inner room and the windows are correctly exposed.

So I think I should use my single 430 EX II to try to give some more light.
And what about the room lights? I believe it would look nices if they are turned on.
Or am I wrong?

Have you some links to give me some idea about to lighten a room?

My tools are
- one 430 EX II
- yn 622c triggers
- 42cm beauty dish
- 60x90cm softbox

thanks

Can you take a photo of the interior so we can see what you have to work with?

The simplest way is to shoot three or four exposures and different white balance settings, then combine them in photoshop to create on photo.

You can always use your flash (aimed behind you) and bounce it off a white surface to add a bit of fill light to the photo. Keep in mind that unless you gel the flash, the color temp will not match the ambient light in the room, assuming that the room is lit by lamps.

jcolman wrote in post #15570797
The simplest way is to shoot three or four exposures and different white balance settings, then combine them in photoshop to create on photo.

I wouldn't call that the simplest way. It's much easier to balance the colors beforehand.

I would recommend a CTO or maybe 1/2 CTO gel on your flash to balance the color temperature. Search B&H for Roscolux Swatchbook to get hundreds of gel colors, cheap.

I would approach this job as follows:
1) Work at night to take window light out of the equation.
2) Bounce your flash off the ceiling, or angle it back to bounce off the ceiling and the wall behind you.
3) Turn on all the room lights. Replace any CFL bulbs with old-fashioned incandescent. This will make it much easier to match the color temperature with a CTO gel.
4) Experiment, vary shutter speed and/or manual flash power to get a pleasing balance of ambient and flash.
5) Use a tripod, mount the camera fairly low and aim straight across the room (not up or down) to eliminate perspective distortion and walls that look tilted.
6) Shoot RAW and adjust color temperature to taste. Probably the most pleasing white balance will be a little on the warm side.

Curtis N wrote in post #15570873
I wouldn't call that the simplest way. It's much easier to balance the colors beforehand.

I would recommend a CTO or maybe 1/2 CTO gel on your flash to balance the color temperature. Search B&H for Roscolux Swatchbook to get hundreds of gel colors, cheap.

I would approach this job as follows:
1) Work at night to take window light out of the equation.
2) Bounce your flash off the ceiling, or angle it back to bounce off the ceiling and the wall behind you.
3) Turn on all the room lights. Replace any CFL bulbs with old-fashioned incandescent. This will make it much easier to match the color temperature with a CTO gel.
4) Experiment, vary shutter speed and/or manual flash power to get a pleasing balance of ambient and flash.
5) Use a tripod, mount the camera fairly low and aim straight across the room (not up or down) to eliminate perspective distortion and walls that look tilted.
6) Shoot RAW and adjust color temperature to taste. Probably the most pleasing white balance will be a little on the warm side.

Sometimes rooms look better with some daylight streaming in, especially an older room. Therefore gelling the light is not really an option because you are likely to have two sources of light (daylight + tungsten) to deal with. Hence my original answer.

I usually do the Photoshop thing. This one was ambient only. In Lightroom I created multiple virtual copies and tweaked the white balance on each to get the tones I wanted, then imported them into PS where I used a little masking. In the end I used a bounce umbrella fired into a bed sheet hung on the wall to illuminate the shadows side of the bed better. Since so much daylight was coming in it didn't make any sense for me to gel my strobes to match tungsten.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/37701636@N07/8​444877571/

Some good advice. Curtis mentioned turing all the light ons. I did some real estate photography and that was a requirement as it makes a difference to the look. Bouncing your flash is great advice as well.

If you want to try this during the here is some you can try. Just some tests I did when I was learning flash. You can have quite a bit of control with window light and your flash. You may have to put your flash on high speed sync. Choose an aperture for the DOF you need and ISO you are comfortable with.

I turned the flash off. Here I took the shot with normal exposure and the widow light was far too bright.

unless its a great view dont worry about the outside so much
better to have it a bit bright and cheery light coming in from outside then seeing some road and chain link or other building etc... out the window

Holy crap, way to many blown highlights in this image.

bdillon wrote in post #15571717
I usually do the Photoshop thing. This one was ambient only. In Lightroom I created multiple virtual copies and tweaked the white balance on each to get the tones I wanted, then imported them into PS where I used a little masking. In the end I used a bounce umbrella fired into a bed sheet hung on the wall to illuminate the shadows side of the bed better. Since so much daylight was coming in it didn't make any sense for me to gel my strobes to match tungsten.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/37701636@N07/8​444877571/
image by Brendan.Dillon, on Flickr

1) make sure your camera is level, this is a must. If it is not level, don't bother taking the photos as the vertical lines that are to be straight will not be straight and the image will not look proper.
2) expose for the brightest thing in the room you want to show. If it is a window then expose for that, keeping you shutter speed at the flash sync or lower
3) if you add flash bounce it off the wall or sit the flash on the top of the open door and bounce into the wall/ceiling/corner
4) refer to #2

inaflash wrote in post #15573486
Holy crap, way to many blown highlights in this image.

looks like just the window curtains are blown to me...

questionmarc wrote in post #15573536
looks like just the window curtains are blown to me...

No. The lights are a little, as well as the bedding. It wasn't the final result, nor was this an architecture shoot. It was a boudoir shoot in a 5 star hotel. That was the only image I had on my ipad to upload at the time. I did a few shots to document the room for my portfolio to justify the $300.00 expense to clients.

bdillon wrote in post #15573599
No. The lights are a little, as well as the bedding. It wasn't the final result, nor was this an architecture shoot. It was a boudoir shoot in a 5 star hotel. That was the only image I had on my ipad to upload at the time. I did a few shots to document the room for my portfolio to justify the $300.00 expense to clients.

im just saying i'm looking at a larger file size of it on your flickr and on my screen only the windows look blown out to me

There's no rule that says light sources can't be overexposed. The window is a light source. Unless you want to draw attention to the view then there's nothing wrong with blowing it out.

questionmarc wrote in post #15573707
im just saying i'm looking at a larger file size of it on your flickr and on my screen only the windows look blown out to me

I took a second look and you're right. There's still plenty of detail elsewhere.