Has anyone discovered a way to successfully use flash lighting for 360 spherical or cubic panoramas? 

I'm wondering if 2 or 3 properly placed bare-bulb remote flash units would work.

?????

callgary

Hi Callgary,

I've thought on it a number of times. but I've never gone so far as to try it out. I don't think that I'd use flashes though because I always use a high aperature which can put the shutter up to pretty high exposure times. I've thought more along the lines of those small utility flood lights that are used to work under the hood of a car among other things. I'm sure there must be cordless ones now too. A few of these placed with care, in spots hidden to the camera, could help a difficult situation. Then, flashlights could be used to light dark ceiling areas. Using different bulbs for the floods would help to even lighting and not over or under do the lighting in an area.

Since I'm not so good with flashes...this is how I've thought about adding lighting to a pano. Remote, infrared triggered flashes would probably be a quick and effective method for someone with the skills.

Hans

Hi,

I ordered my Sunpak 120J barebulb flash I will use in the hotshoe of my Coolpix5000 (or with a flash bracket and cable).

It can only be used in manual mode, because Sunpak has no adapter for digital cameras, yet. The synchronisation of flash release will work.

Results, next year, perhaps ...

Anxious to hear about/see your results with the Sunpak, Blackrat.

Thanks & Merry Christmas!

callgary

Hey people,

Has anybody used flash (for lighting) while shooting the 2 or 3 fisheyes?

I'm thinking this might solve the problem with lighting balancing. For example, some parts of the room or walls are darker than others and then the final pano shows these color differences. With flash, all will be illuminated equally.

Flash will also solve the burn out / white washed window problems. If you use flash to shoot bright windows, you'll be able to see right through!

My camera has a flash but the fisheye lens blocks it so it does not perform well.

Yes, I did try on a recent photo shoot at Santa Fe, New Mexico.

My test result was not good.  Uneven lighting made stitching results very poor.

Dave

glad your back daves.

your absence was noticeable although phoenix and smooth put up a good fight

Dave, did you use the flash on camera or off camera, and how many did you use ?

Has anybody here tried the approach of using a professional lighting setup (hot lights or strobes, umbrellas, softboxes) in the production of panoramas ?

This is something I would be very interested to try.

John

knotty john....lol

this would be a nice set up...but will it be efficient? cost effective?

1. you have lots more equipment to buy, carry, set up.

2. more time setting up, sycrhonizing, etc.

3. more time setting off

if you get it to work perfectly for you, then the resulting panos would probably look amazing...but your clientele would have to be high end/expensive projects.

as is, is hard enough to get an real estate agent to pay $50 for a tour, now i assume it would be harder to get someone to pay $1000.

and why would they pay $1000, if there are people that would do ti for cheaper.

in theory is awsome, i thought about this a while back as well...in practice...is debatable.

Agree with VT360 in the last post.

From my brief experimentation with 3 sb800 speedlights, diffusers and iTTL flash, it caused more shadow, hightlight problems than it was worth. I ended up with much better results without flash and cloning/blending the windows from a stepped down exposure, it's definately quicker everytime.