Very Bright Background advise needed for Flash

I just come back from shooting a new Restaurant that launched tonight I noticed that the Archietect had gone into great length lighting up the the bottles.. I attempted in taking this image but i never seemed i could get it right! the white light in the background was showing overexposed in the Histogram..... How would you setup up the Flash to ensure that the image is well exposed? How can this image also be taken creatively? any ideas out there!!!

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What color and how high is the ceiling?

Why not bracket the exposure? Take a shot at -3EV, -2, -1, 0, 1 with maybe the flash stopped down and at the ceiling to diffuse some shadows.

yarnos wrote in post #2770139
I just come back from shooting a new Restaurant that launched tonight I noticed that the Archietect had gone into great length lighting up the the bottles.. I attempted in taking this image but i never seemed i could get it right! the white light in the background was showing overexposed in the Histogram..... How would you setup up the Flash to ensure that the image is well exposed? How can this image also be taken creatively? any ideas out there!!!

Its hard to tell just looking at one photo (and its on my bad work PC monitor), but I would let that bright white back ground over expose. Its ment to be white, and I would assume its ment to be bright clean white, and letting it over expose will give you that.

So, manual exposure, on a tripod, and expose for the rest of the bar.
If your luckey you will get one good exposure of the bar and bottles on the shelf with a bright white background.
If your unlucky the bright white behind the bottles will be so much it will also over expose some of the bottles as well, in which case you might find it easiest to take to two exposures, and combine them.

With regard to useing the flash to light it, I would use two, one to each side of the camera.
If you use E-TTL then you will need to adjust the FEC to allow for the bright white behind the bottles, otherwise shoot with manual flash as well.
Still aim to slightly over expose that bright light behind the bottles, thats a lot of shiney surfaces for flash to reflect off

Would second curtian flash work in this case? Or would the long exposure (maybe 3-4 sec) blow out the white lights too much?

pepperoni wrote in post #2774337
Would second curtian flash work in this case?

It will have no effect
When useing flash you get two exposures.
One for the ambient light, and one for the flash light.
Useing 2nd curtian simply puts the flash at the end of the ambient exposure.

The problem with this example is the large difference in light levels between the resturant, and the lighting behind the bottles on the shelves.

yarnos is hopeing he can balance out the contrast difference by useing flash to light the rest of the resturant and bar, hopefully to the same level as the light behind the bottles.
The trick will be doing it will still preserving the atmosphere created by architects lighting, including the bright light behind the bottles on the bar

I would second illy's suggestion of taking multiple shots at different exposure settings and then use Photoshop to combine them into one image (similar to HDR).

On the other hand, if you want to use flash, you'll need to drag the shutter to capture some of that atmosphere. Also, I wouldn't even think of attempting this without a tripod.

Definately multiple exposures and a tripod.

Determine the exposure for the bottles and backlighting (just a bit darker than the example, would probably bring out the edges of the bottles against the backlight) shooting with camera in M. The next step is simply to turn on the flash and use it to expose the restarant and bar area just enough to see some of the details without necessarily distracting the eye from from the bottles and backlight, and you control that with FEC. Most scenes, like this one, is two shots in one... the shot with the flash, and the shot with the ambient light, and not hard at all to set up.