I recently ran into an interesting but not uncommon problem while shooting a twilight exterior photo of a credit union. The flag was illuminated by a metal halide high intensity discharge lamp mounted in a fixture about ten inches off of the ground. This ground level light was aimed up at the flag, but from camera position it blasted right into the lens.

An architectural photographer has to be prepared for such things, so I always carry pieces of heavy black mat board to cover problem lights. As I was measuring the fixture to cut a piece of mat board Inoticed that the fixture could be rotated to face the building. No more lensflare and it lit the area to the left of the entrance perfectly!

We then placed one flash head on a ten-inch stand to light the front of the building to the right of the entrance and gelled it to matchthe color of the metal halide floodlight. I used a Gossen Color Pro 3 meter to read the color of the floodlight and the flash. Gells were added to the flash until its color matched the floodlight. (There are three main types of high intensity discharge lamps; metal halidewhich appears white to the eye, sodium vapor which looks very orange and mercury vapor which looks bluish white. These lights have virtually no red in their spectrum.)

Since the wind was blowing the flag to camera right and part of it would have been cropped off, I decided to remove the flag for this shot.We folded up the flag, made several exposures as the sky darkened, then called it a day!

©Curt Clayton   Clayton Studio