I spent a couple of days over the past week photographing a small college in Phoenix that is launching a new website. One of the shots we wanted to include was of a large social room on the top floor of the residence hall. The shot posed some challenges because of the amount of sunlight that floods the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows that comprise the southern and eastern walls.

As you can see in the image on the left above, if you expose for the outside light, the interior falls into deep shadow.  If you expose for the interior, however, the exterior and any sunlit areas of the interior will be overexposed. The trick is to set the camera so the sunlit areas are properly exposed and then use strobes to light the rest of the room.

Setting up a photograph like this generally requires a little trial and error, although using a light meter helps mitigate the number of test shots necessary to get the right exposure. Though I have had a light meter for years, I have only recently become an avid user, thanks to the acquisition of a small accessory that allows me to wirelessly trigger my strobes with the meter, greatly simplifying the process of balancing natural and artificial light.

We began the process of lighting the room by setting up two 1600 w/s strobes in the corners of the rooms on either side of the camera. Because we were trying to balance bright sunlight coming through the windows, I knew we were going to need a lot of light, so neither of the strobes had soft boxes or umbrellas. We just attached simple reflectors to blast out as much light as possible. Which led to this problem:

To spread out the light more evenly with less loss of power than we would experience using a softbox, we simply tipped the strobes up to use the ceiling as a giant reflector. That helped, although at 1/250th of a second and f/8, the sky is now washed out, as are the sunlit areas of the room.

So, we stopped down the aperture to f/16 and tweaked the strobes again. In addition to correcting the lighting of the room, the smaller aperture added depth of field so the final image would be in focus from foreground to background.

In the final step, we moved the furniture around, positioned our models, and warmed up the white balance on the camera to give the room a cozier feel. We also cropped the image in post, to get rid of the distracting open space of the ceiling and the obtrusive spotlights. And this is what we ended up with:

Finally, the technical info: Nikon D3s, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor zoom, two White Lightning X3200 strobes on 13 ft. light stands, and a Sekonic L-358 light meter.  Here is a diagram of the lighting set-up: