I got a call late last week from the PR group that represents the Element Hotel chain (they’re a Starwood property). The Element in Lexington is starting a new program where each room will be equiped with a Nintendo DS loaded with recipe software. The program will then talk you through various meals you can cook in your room with ingredients available at the hotel – pretty cool (and much better than another dinner at Applebees).
I shot a little less than a hundred images, delivering 2, the background of one of which I wanted to share here.
One of the shots the client requested was an image with the Nintendo in the foreground and the hotel logo in the background. Pretty straight forward, right? Well, sorta.
Things started Here’s the lobby lit by ambient light. Note the pukey green fluorscent light above the logo.
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Clearly that’s not going to work. The first step was to ask the hotel manager to turn off the light. “Um, sorry, there’s no switch for that light.” Great. As I was trying to figure out how many images I was going to have to blend to tame the exposure variation, the hotel manager just unscrewed the lighbulb. Um. Duh. Simple. Easy.
Here’s the room ambient with the green tube light turned off.
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ZZZ. Boring
Solution? Let’s start with a diagram and a behind the scenes shot.
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Notice how the flash that’s lighting the logo isn’t even pointing directly at it. With the opposite white wall, the feathering of the light (meaning, not pointing the light directly at the logo), and the bounce off of the white wall serve to light the logo evenly. I then lit the Gameboy separately with a little pop from an SB-600 zoomed to 85mm. (Why 85mm? To control the spill. I didn’t want to light the counter or background, just the foreground element).
And here’s the final image (I dropped the screen shot in later in Photoshop).
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The other image from the shoot.
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More to come, I’ve busy week ahead, including my first destination wedding. (Helllllo St. Louis!)
