thanks for the tips! i'll keep that in mind for the next shoot. i find that i don't really have that much time to set up the lights properly on site tho. that's why i rely on exposure blending. i brought with me 4 speedlights and 2 stands with umbrellas but did not have time to set up and tinker with settings.
On HDR, Hogan phrased it very well recently in his D5100 commentary:
I've never understood this "you need lots of overlapping images to do HDR" thing that is being promoted by what now seems like everyone under the sun. What happens is you end up with a lot of the same data that has to then be curved against each other. The D5100 does two-shot HDR (up to three stops apart), which is exactly what I do in the field. Shoot for the highlights, shoot for the shadows, you've got enough overlapping data in the middle. If you need more than three stops on top of the eight or nine real stops the camera can give you, you've got a different problem: you're so outside the DR that can be put on paper or on a screen that you've just made your curving of the data a really big pain to get right. Two exposures should be all you need to establish the toe and the shoulder data, and give you enough overlap in the middle ramp to use for your mid-tone blending.
As far as lighting quickly goes, I sometimes do the multilight trick with flashes (also handy if you only have one or two flashes you can wirelessly control):
shot1: expose for ambient (windows)
shot2: flash in location 1, full power or close, exposed for flash
shot3: flash in location 2, full power or close, exposed for flash
.... as many as needed, including several options for fill
This is quick - snap - move flash -snap etc.
Blend by hand in photoshop, usually as simple as varying layer opacity.
and bingo, you can adjust all your lighting levels quickly after the fact. you can't adjust the nature of the light though, so it's useful to think about that as you go (snoot, diffuser, etc).
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