I’ve worked out the basic lighting setup for Doctor Rognvald’s lab, and added practical light objects to match them (well, except for that door up on the catwalk, anyway). So far I’ve only got one "cheat" light in here – that’s premature, really, since I’ll mainly add the cheat lights when I’m setting up shots for the illustrations I need. But I wanted a little rim light on that floor lamp.
What we’ve got here is a pretty realistic general lighting setup that I’ll mutate and change and modify for the individual shots I need for the story.
What’s left to do is to add two more light fixtures, and then have a look at the camera angles to decide what other clutter I need on the table, and what indistinct shapes I want to add in the shadows… at which point the lab itself will be pretty much done, and I can move onto a couple of important props. Altogether I’m dangerously close to being able to make pictures in here. Muahahahahaha!
The more time I spend in here the more I find that I’d kind of like a room like this to work in. It’s well equipped: you can’t tell in this shot, but that’s an espresso machine at the far end of the table. What more do you need?
The downside of working on a project of this scale is that it takes so long to get everything done. But part of the upside is that I’ll have such cool sets and props to use in other pictures. I know I’ll want to revisit this lab when I can. I’m really looking forward to making poster-scale images of this one.
Even at high res, though, you’ll never be able to make out the ridiculous labels on the dials and buttons. There’s a "Hyphenation" dial, not to mention the "% Froglike" one. I guess those are just for me.
Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com
