Shooting into lit homes at night

[v_roma]

Hi everyone,

I am helping out on a project and need to photograph some homes in our neighborhood at night. A large portion of the front of the houses is glass and, due to night lights, security flood lights, parked cars, etc, I'm getting all sorts of unwanted reflections. A polarizer filter won't help since I'm photographing the houses/windows head on (i.e., not at an angle). Short of rigging up some kind of enormous frame with non-reflective black fabric and placing it behind the camera, is there anything I can do to eliminate or minimize the reflections?

Any ideas would be much appreciated!

 

[Chris101]

... is there anything I can do to eliminate or minimize the reflections? ...

Nothing I can think of. You might try shooting at an angle with a shift lens to make it square. The last time I shot like this was with a 4x5, and could not stand directly in front of the house (Christmas decorations) because of parked cars. I too wanted the face of the house to be squared off.

 

[v_roma]

After some research, black muslin might be a good option too.

 

[dave lackey]

There are a lot of movie productions continually going in our area. Every location has houses, porches, depots, you name it, all wrapped in some kind of black plastic similar to the landscape material used in flower beds.:angel:

 

[willie_901]

Have you considered lighting the inside of the homes with strobes? The idea is to get the light from the inside to be just strong enough to kill the light from the reflections. I use up to five strobes and I have access to two more if needed.

I use battery powered SB-800s and SB-80DXs strobes in full manual mode. The strobes are on light stands, tripods, or on shorter stands that can be hid behind chairs, sofas, etc. I trigger the strobes with radio-controlled Pocket Wizards (PWs). PWs work over long distances (at least 1,600 ft) and never fail (assuming they have good batteries and the cables are not defective). Inexpensive triggers work too, but they are unreliable (especially at long distances).

The SB-800 and 80DX strobes have built-in optical triggers. The triggers are extremely sensitive and reliable. This means one strobe triggered with a PW can then trigger numerous strategically placed strobes without PWs. These strobes also also have power control from full power to 1/128 power in 1/3 stop increments. One can gel the strobes to match tungsten light. The strobes have full manual control and they have lenses so you can spread the light (use the 17 mm setting) or focus it (105 mm setting).

Control the light from the strobes with aperture and control the external light exposure with the shutter speed. Sometimes the exterior lights have to controlled for proper exposure (not for refection suppression). It helps to replace porch lightbulbs with low power bulbs. There are ways to apply inexpensive ND gels to external lights too.

This may not work for reflections from intense, point source lights, but it should work for less intense indirect reflections. Of course you have to carefully place the strobes to avoid reflections from mirrors and picture frame glass, etc. Likewise you want to avoid large obvious interior shadows. You have to have enough strobes to evenly light the rooms.

I suspect a high-budget, commercial still-photography shoot would use strobes inside and scrims outside to make reflection problems go away.

 

[v_roma]

Willie, thanks. That's a great suggestion, of course. I did think that increasing the light inside would help. However, I don't own strobes and related equipment, and purchasing this would be beyond the budget of this project. The scrim option, however, should be doable. It seems that I can get 10 x 20 black muslin backdrop plus wooden poles, plus clamps, all for under $50. Hopefully, that will be enough to control most of the reflections given that the most problematic ones are coming from directly behind the camera.

 

[lynnb]

Is it possible to take two exposures from a tripod, one for the interior exposure with all interior lights switched on, and another of the exterior using as powerful a strobe as possible to overpower the reflections? - then blend the two exposures in pp?