Luke's Projects: Test Shoot at Rouge Lounge, The Event Space

Arrived at location around 2:00 PM on a rainy fall day. It is not super bright outside but there is enough contrast. Hence, the best way to do the shoot is exposure bracketing. What is exposure bracketing and why it is necessary? Exposure bracketing is shooting the same subject multiple times with different exposure time. Each of the shot will provide a different dynamic range of luminance of lightest and darkest areas of that frame. Through post-processing, a single High Dynamic Range (HDR) photograph will be generated using specialized software.

Aperture: To capture the highest depth of field (everything in focus regardless of distance from the camera), an aperture of f/22.0 was use.

Exposure Used: Exposure bracketing of 5 shots per frame. Each shot was 0.7 stop off the other. The exposure times ranged from 5.0 s to 30 s.

Lens Focal Length: 10 mm of the 10-20 mm lens was used. The real focal length (measured in terms of 35 mm film is actually 15 mm. This is because the Nikon D2x is not a full-frame (35 mm) DSLR camera.

Number of Frames: With the 10 mm lens it was possible to capture the 360° view with 6 frames (includes sufficient overlaps between frames). To capture the ceiling, it might be sufficient with a single frame. The keyword here is “might be.” Let see what happens when the stitching begins.

The Shoot: It took about 3 hours (including setup, chatting with the owner, still photos of the kitchen, and take down) to shoot 3 separate areas (the main area was shot twice) and a total of 171 photographs were taken (including 6 photos of the kitchen).

Lessons Learned from the Shoot

Panoramic tripod head needs to be properly sized for the camera. In this particular case, some parallax might exist because the lens was approximately 0.5 cm off the spinning axis of the tripod head (the camera is bigger than the Nodal Ninja 3 can adjust for).
Drastic lighting colours within the same space is an issue. In this particular case, part of the shooting area was lit by red florescent lights and the rest was a combination of halogen lights and incandescent lights.
Non-reflecting objects / decorations must be placed in front of mirrors. Otherwise, the camera will be visible.
People movements must be reduced as much as possible because of exposure bracketing and long exposure time.
A measuring tape would have come in handy to determine the centre of the room (at least the middle between 2 of the 4 walls). It will make the 360° view more evenly distributed.

Exposure Bracketed Photos