Dora Faix is an artist and a friend of mine. She makes hand painted tiles, murals, mosaic works and many other things.
She asked me to make a few photographs of one of her mosaic works in an elementary school for her Web site.

She warned me in advance that the scene is quite poorly lit. Hence we decided to make the shots when we had the most daylight available and I took two SB-800s with me.

Relative darkness was only one of challenges. The uneven light coming through the windows and the curvature of the walls were the others.

First I was trying to work without the speedlights with longer exposure times having the camera on a tripod. It did not work well because of the uneven lighting: some parts of the images were OK while others stayed in dark. 
Then I switched the flashes on. For this picture I placed one speedlight to the first turn of the stair case and the other one level below that. To my surprise the commander mode from the D80 was working fine and the flash lights got the signal and fired even in this distance and not being in sight at all. I suppose the signals were reflected from the walls. The speedlights were in remote mode and I set the power of the SB-800s from the camera experimenting between 1/16 and full power. I shot roughly 10 pictures with different flash settings to find the somewhat appropriate lighting.

I expected the curvature of the wall to cause some focusing issues: giving to much unsharp areas on the images. I was using higher aperture settings in trying to avoid it. I might have used even higher ones. :-)    For this picture there was one flash just in front of of the camera tripod pointing to the ceiling and an other in the turn of the staircase.

Click on the picture for the slideshow of the rest of the images.

I appreciate any suggestions for the next time. :-)