Lighting Interiors

Photographers who have little or no experience with interiors photography often ask about formulas for placement of supplementary lighting. For some genres of photography, such as portraiture, there are formulas that one can rely upon when using supplementary lighting. However, there are really no lighting formulas for interior photography, as far as placement of the lights and lighting ratios. It depends upon so many things: the kind and amount of equipment you have, the look you are after for the photo, the configuration of the room, the colors of all the major surfaces, the time of day, and so on. What one needs to understand mostly is how light works and what one's resources are as far as lights and light shaping equipment and materials. Most just dive in and gain that understanding intuitively with a lot of practice, but a book such as Light, Science and Magic might be of some help as a reference. It is really a matter of constant problem solving if one wants to do it well.