I've been asked to shoot some images for a friends school showing students doing various school activities in classrooms and around the school. I've got access to a variety of gear including lighting and fast glass and I'm wondering how best to shoot the indoor scenes. Do I use OCF to try to drop ambient light levels to a point where the outside light is not blown out, potentially leading to less natural looking scenes inside the room. Or do I shoot with natural light as much as possible and let the windows blow out? To be honest I'm more comfortable shooting natural light but have a good understanding of the strobing basics.
Would greatly appreciate your input on this situation.
If you shoot in RAW, you can probably fix the windows easily enough, but your subjects and focus will be in the classroom. I'm not one of those people bothered by blown window light unless it's to the point of dominating the picture.
I like Ron's approach to doing what you know. But If you have some time to practice and a few speedlights or whatever lighting, I would practice at your house. I know I practiced in my house when my wife was doing multiple tasks like baking, playing with our dog. I set up my OCF in different corners of the room depending on the action. So while she was baking I would bounce flash from the corners to help light up the room and balance it to the ambient outside. A little practice goes a long way. OCF also allows me to be a bit further away from the action and still get nice even lighting for the whole room and not have to worry about which way my on cam flash is bouncing. I think the flash will help you get better focused shots and crisp results. Depending on the classroom lighting and size just natural light may not give you the results your after. Just depends on how much natural light is available.
I'm meeting with the client this week to discuss the shot list and look at potential locations for the shots they need. Will be able to assess light a bit more once I've had that meeting.
DOF may well be an issue for shooting small groups of students, so I may need to stop the aperture down to get the depth of field that I need and thus will need to augment with artificial light to get the levels that I need anyway.
You could start by putting the window at your back. That takes the blown out exterior out of play. You still may need to supplement the room light with flash, as the window light will be brighter than the farther corners of the room. In that case, depending on your shooting angle, you can either use an off-camera flash, or simply bounce an on-camera speedlite back into the wall immediately behind you or to a side wall up high to provide a broader fill.
Had the meeting with the client and walked through the school on Friday and it looks like it's going to be huge mish-mash of lighting and levels. There are classrooms that have almost no natural light, to rooms that have large windows on three walls. Being typical classrooms they have walls covered with all sorts of artwork/posters/notices etc which I'll need to try and work around to get clean backgrounds and make for less busy shots.
I think the trick will be to go for tighter compositions at longer focal lengths and try to remove backgrounds that way.
I'm thinking that on camera bounce flash will be the easiest to work on the fly without requiring too much set up and pack down every time I move locations. I won't have an assistant, so need to be as self-contained as possible.
