Lighting A Room With Stationary Flashes

I like to complain about having to use on-camera flash to light people when I shoot indoors. Unfortunately, there is no alternative (that I'm willing to employ) if I'm shooting in a large indoor venue like a nightclub. But what if all my subjects are in one room? In a controlled and relatively static situation like that, David Hobby (The Strobist) describes a very cool alternative to lighting with on-camera flash. Here's David's technique in a nutshell: Get two flashes wireless controlled by the camera, put the two flashes on opposite corners of the room, and point them up at the ceiling. His setup provides even lighting to just about every inch of the room. You're now free to move about and take photos without flashing people directly in the face! Unfortunately, what looks good on paper doesn't always translate perfectly to the real world. Here's a diagram of my lighting setup and some original photos: Setup Original #1 Original #2 Original #3 Before I continue, let me set the stage. We were all in Mark's family room. The flash at the top right corner of the diagram is on a lightstand which is visible in the top right corner of Original #1. The second flash is in the top left corner of Photo #2. The second flash sat in a hollow part of the wall connecting the family room to the living room and hallway. Now onto the problems! Problem 1: Everything is too dark. As you can see in the last two photos, the room was not lit up as much as I wanted. I think a big reason was that much of the light from the second flash bled into the adjacent hallway and living room and therefore did not help illuminate the family room. So why didn't I increase the power of the flash? See below. Problem 2: Hot spot in the corners I really didn't like the hot spots in the corners of the room, especially near the first flash (see Original #1). I don't know how to correct it. I'm going to have to chew on this problem for awhile... In conclusion, despite my setup not working exactly as I planned, I'm happy with the results. When I think about how my friends would have looked had I blasted them with on-camera flash, I know I made the right choice by trying out David's technique. By the way, the intro photo at the top of the post looks pretty good, because I increased the exposure in Lightroom. Thank goodness for post-processing!