Let's say I am shooting indoors in a small room. I have some lights in the background, like an LED strip, without much possibility of changing them around. Now I want to photograph a person in front of the LED strips and I want them to be properly lighted while also having the colour from the LEDs show up in a way that makes sense. I want to use a 35 mm lens and I don't have too much space to work with, like maybe two meters max between the background and the person in the foreground.
Various dilemmas I am facing now:
- If I want the lights in the back to look good, I need to reduce ambient light as much as possible
- This means the person in the foreground is not lighted properly, so I need to introduce a different light source for them
- Putting a flash and a small softbox close to that person (not even thinking about fill lights etc.) means that I need to introduce more distance between subject and background so that my key light does not end up overpowering the background lights
- Putting in too much distance means my 35 mm ends up showing too much of the background, including parts that I don't necessarily want to capture
Switching lenses is not an option in this case due to space restrictions and the general look I want to achieve. So how do I approach this best? I considered the following solutions:
- Buying a beauty dish to use as my key light and hoping that with a honeycomb grid the light fall-off would be quick enough to not really reach the background
- Using some form of exposure bracketing and fixing everything in post
I am really not too fond of 2, so would 1 be the magic bullet that's going to solve my issue? Or is there a different approach I have not considered that would solve this as well?