Multi-exposure

One of the issues with photographing interiors is when exposing for the internal conditions the views through windows are very overexposed. Also you quite commonly use a wide-angle with which a single flash doesn't cover well. Online tutorials get over this with multiple exposures including one with a fill-in flash merged and messed around with in layers in Photoshop, which I don't use. However the K1 has multi-exposure mode with RAW output of the finished file so I have been experimenting with this, and for the best results so far I have used the following settings with the DFA 15-30mm:
Mount securely on a tripod and use remote control, in manual exposure set at ISO 100 and f11. Focus and switch to manual unless you are set to back-button focus. Select multi-exposure average, in my case 3 exposure at medium speed. For white balance select multi-auto so that different light sources are given the same colour temperature. For the first exposure select a speed to expose the outside correctly, say 1/200, and attach a flash - in my case I had two attached, one AF-201FG on top the camera and an AF360FGZ II in my hand pointing to the right and both set at 1/4 output. For the second exposure I just pointed the handheld flash to the left so covering the whole field. For the last exposure both flashes were switched off and the speed slowed until the interior was exposed correctly.

In previous experiments I found with only one exposure matching the outside and two or more for the interior the averaging meant that the outside was still rather overexposed and strange artifacts appeared where blown areas had not merged well with normally exposed part. It occurred that even with just one flash I could take multiple exposures and just point the flash at different areas each time, avoiding the need for carrying lots of lighting to a location.

In this experiment the lens is pointing downwards to get more of the outside in view otherwise a horizontal position would eliminate the perspective distortion.

Having got the combined exposure about right I edited in Lightroom with the usual tweaks, reduced shadow and the green exposure and here is the result:



PS the downloaded image has come out rather unsharp but the original jpeg is pin sharp.

Just received documents for my Northumberland trip, which will include multi-exposure tuition. They advise that only certain Canon and Nikon bodies can blend in camera, up to 10 exposures, and one Sony body can blend 2 RAW images. In contrast the K1 can blend up to 2000 images in three different modes, and even the K50 can blend up to 9 in RAW. These are the kind of hidden facilities that never get mentioned in reviews and which make Pentax cameras a bit special.

Interesting. I must give this a try sometime.

I think the reason so many exposures are available is to enable long exposure effects like smoothed water and clouds without needing an ND filter.