I just got home from the dance event I was photographing this weekend. It was an awful lot like work, except for the bit about the paycheck.
One of my challenges photographing the dance competitions was the aspect ratio of the room. Unfortunately it wasn't at the venue with the wonderfully handy mezzanine. The lights were about 10' high, and I'll guess that the room was about 40' wide. Combining the inverse square law and the pythagorean theorem that means that light falls off at the ratio of 1/(height^2 + distance^2) If we take the intensity at the base of the lamps as 1, this gives us roughly: 00' = 1 10' = 1/2 1 stop 14 ' = 1/3 17' = 1/4 2 stop 20' = 1/5 27' = 1/8 3 stop 30' = 1/9 40' = 1/17 4 stop My first thought was that I needed a graduated neutral density filter for my strobe to even out the light across the room, so that I wasn't running up against blowing out objects in the foreground, while objects in the distance faded to black. But, that would waste a lot of photons. What I really want is a graduated fresnel lens that would redirect light that would otherwise overexpose near objects, onto otherwise underexposed objects in the distance. It's my hope and guess that inferior quality of the optics would blur the beam enough that there wouldn't be a bunch of sharply defined bands of light and dark. Does this device already exist? If so, where could I get one? -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
