Thought I´d revive this thread since I have an assignment that I´m a litte puzzled over:
I´m going to document an exhibition of paintings, and the artist wants me to produce images that are as close to the original lighting, contrast and color. The pictures will show the paintings in context, the rooms of the museum. The exhibition consists of massive dark black-grey-green paintings with a lot of structure in them. What makes me scratch my head is the lighting. The rooms are lit in a low-key light, almost like twilight. It´s very cool, and it´s making the paintings even heavier and darker, and I want to communicate that muted feeling in the pictures.
Here you can see one of the paintings:
http://www.lautom.no/exhibitions/show/1But the big question is how to meter and expose to get the contrast right, but at the same time exposing to the right since the main subject is in the far left of the histogram? The easy way would be to spot meter an 18% grey card, but then I won´t be exposing to the right. I´m thinking that somehow I should be able to use the color checker grayscale as a reference to get the right exposure and contrast when pulling the exposure in ACR?
Would it be reasonable to meter an 18% grey card and then adding one stop and pulling one stop in ACR?? Or am I missing something?