4 Stories of Flash! (speedlights kick ass!)

Now how could I light this stair well all the way down to the bottom?  4 Stories down!

Well firstly, I head to the top of the stairs and shoot the scene.

Which the details will be at the Read more info part

Lets go into manual mode and give the image 1/60th of s second at f4 iso 280 exposure.  It seems to give a good exposure for the top of the stairs (where the stairwell skylight is) but the bottom is almost totally black

(as you can see here)

So lets shove on our Nikon sb900 flash and spot meter for the dark bit at the bottom of the stairs and lets see what it does

Well you can see that to top of the stairs are now a lot brighter and you can see a bit of shadow made from the flash just under the banisters so the flash has brightened things up a bit but the flash was on a zoom mode so it was the same as the lens (11mm - which on the sb900 the closest it can get to is 12mm, close enough)

  But is has not really increased the brightness that much at the bottom of the stairs  

as you can see here

My thought here is that if I want to brighten up the bottom of the stairs I am going to need an extra flash somewhere down the bottom of the stairs and have it synced with my on camera flash…. could be tricky nay impossible

But there is another idea I have up my sleeve!

The Nikon sb900 has a flash zoom function it goes from 12mm to 200mm!

lets see what happens when I put the flash manually zoomed into 200mm and aim it down the bottom of the stairs (still on top of my camera).

Blimy!  I can see right to the bottom (4 floors) down

here is a cropped shot

And with only a smidgen of lightroom adjustment 

I can even make out the dirt on the floor and the colour of the saddle one of the bike's have.

And that is it shooting in TTL, I tried it in manual and stuck the flash on full power but it blew away most of the top of the stair!  I am impressed at the level of exposure equal-ness over the image.

Just shows you what a little flash can do and why the £330 asking price is although a bit high, is still what I would rather pay for than a studio light setup.