Light Painting

Light Painting – Interior Showroom Dubai

I sometimes use 4-5 lights for a portrait but lighting a large interior space needs something more.

A good client asked me to do a shoot (30+ images) of their paint showroom in Dubai for internal use. Now, I am not an interiors shooter and this is a massive showroom. So after explaining this to the client, they still asked me to go ahead.

Lighting for me is natural, but Photoshop is my major weakness and interiors need lots of it. So I watched a few YouTube vids on techniques and did a few test shots.

The daylight view was not great. Harsh ambient light and unwanted reflections flooded the showroom. There was also a car park to the left.

Jotun Showroom Blog Original
Harsh ambient light and reflections were a problem

To solve this issue, I shot at night. Using my Canon 5d3 with 14mm f2.8L II lens on a tripod, I took a base shot using just ambient light (Image below). I wanted to have the back display panels lit by existing wall lights. Then I would just paint the rest of my own lighting in.

Jotun Showroom Blog
Base shot taken at f11, 1/4 sec, iso 200

I set a 10 sec timer to my Canon 5d3 and then worked my way around the showroom with a Profoto B1, painting a small area one shot at a time. The Profoto B1 is easy to hold and powerful enough for lighting large interior spaces.

Jotun Showroom Blog-11
Profoto B1 is easy to hold and powerful enough to light large areas

This technique allows specific areas to be painted creatively and gives a lighting effect that could not be produced even with multiple lights.

Jotun Showroom Blog
The computer screen looks like it on but I am under the table with a Profoto B1 and zoom reflector to control spread

Slightly overpainting each image leaves room for fine tuning lighting in each layer as you can mask in the light at around 40-50% etc.

Painting the showroom exterior was the hardest part. The low ceiling, glass front and acute angled exterior window (on the left of the showroom) made it impossible to spread light evenly on the showroom exterior.

Jotun Showroom Blog-17
The shiny floor and glass front reflected light easily

Once done, I stacked all the images together in Photoshop, masking in my lighting one image at a time. The final image took several hours to edit as it contains a total of 18 separate images, with a 3.8gb file size!

Jotun Showroom Blog Print-18
The final cropped image gives a warm feel to the showroom

This was a first for me and also a great learning curve. I have never used this technique before and didn’t realise just how much editing is involved…

Gear used: Canon 5d3, 14mm f2.8L II, Profoto B1, zoom reflector.

To view more of my images, please visit my web esam hassanyeh

 

3 thoughts on “Light Painting – Interior Showroom Dubai”

  2. Hi Kumbo,

    Thanks for your comment.

    Correct…usually I would use Datacolor Spyder Checkr for more colour accuracy.

    Also, this client only wanted images for interior use and asked for a warmer feel and were very flexible. They also requested a large number of images which would have been impossible to light, edit and create given the huge size of the showroom and very limited budget available…so again client was fine with that.

    Finally, as you know, when you hit a colour surface with light, unless its a big even spread of light you will get variation (of colour temperature) and different colour shades…especially if directional.

    As explained in the blog post, this was a first for me and not a shot I would include in my portfolio…but its fine for a blog post – more to explore light rather than the quality of my (bad) interior photography 🙂

    cheers!

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment