>
> With your proposal you couldn't have lit the people at the rear who were
> about 45 feet away.
>
Very true. However, this has me thinking about something. Let's pretend
that instead of light, we're dealing with sound. Since I design sound
systems, I think this should be doable...
Let's take your photograph of the group of people as an example. Just for
argument sake, let's say that a flash near the camera location would be
sufficient for lighting the people. Let's ignore fancy fill-lighting for
this discussion, just assume that the camera-location flash is sufficient.
The problem is that we have light fall-off with flash-subject distance. If
you want the people in front lit correctly, your back people will be, say 2
stops under exposed.
What I'm thinking of is a trick we use with sound systems in this very
situation. We use two speakers in the cluster. The one speaker covering the
closer audience is a "short-throw" (usually wide-angle coverage) speaker,
and the second speaker is aimed farther back in the room and is of a
"long-throw" design. The long-throw speaker is typically of a narrower
coverage and may be higher-powered than the short-throw speaker.
So, assuming a dog-meat flash, such as the Vivitar 285HV, we have two of
these flashes aimed at the people. The first one would have the zoom-head
set at wide-angle and the second flash would be set at telephoto. The second
flash would be aimed slightly higher and targeted towards the back people.
As the 285HV's coverage pattern is a little, uh, sloppy, a light diffusion
(stocking?) over the flash would help smooth the edges (and nasty fresnel
pattern) out a bit. The slight diffusion would give a smoother gradient in
the fall-off of the pattern which would allow for a gentler transition in
the overlapping coverage patterns.
So, essentually, from one lighting location, we can play "zone coverage"
with our flashes. One close and the other far. The people up close are lit
by the wide-angle flash and the ones far away are lit by the telephoto
flash. The two flashes could be velcro strapped together to eliminate
dualing shadows and eye highlights.
Assuming that this would work, and I can't think of any reason it wouldn't,
I would light the group with one or two clusters of flashes. (one each side
of the camera for even lighting--requiring four zoom-head flash units). I
would then take additional flashes and light the room with them. Flashes
fired across the room from one side to the other would possibly do the
trick.
AG
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