Architectural Spot Lighting saves the day in student housing photo project
While shooting at NEIU in Chicago, I took the time to do some spot lighting on this scene. In this first image you can see what the camera sees and there are lots of lighting problems. The window is easily 8 stops hotter than the couches in the foreground. The windows are almost blown out and couches are dark. I could have fused 5 bracketed photos as I often do, but I wanted to test this approach to lighting.
The Nest at NEIU architectural photograph out of the camera image
I walked around and used a Canon 600 ex rt speedlite with no modifier on it to spot light 6 areas. I triggered the camera from my Ipad which was loaded with the Cam Ranger software. The camera had the Cam Ranger unit attached to the fire wire port. This gives me the freedom to walk around and spot light and change the settings on the camera or on the flash without having to walk back to the camera.
Spot lit scene of The Nest
Then I painted in those lit areas in Photoshop. Even with no modifier on the flash to soften the shadows, I ended up with a much more appealing architectural photograph.
Final image of The Nest with spot lighting done in Photoshop
Residential Real Estate Photography special technique
Though I don’t do much residential real estate photography , since I am so busy with commercial architectural photography, I was hired to shoot a home to be listed on MLS, and it immediately got a full price offer in just a day on the market. The living room of the house had a vaulted ceiling so to show as much of this room as possible, I chose to photomerge two shots in Photoshop. This require that I shoot one lower and one higher image. I can do this because when I shoot with my Canon 17mm Tilt Shift lens, it allows me to maintain the true verticals in the images, allowing Photohop to be able to merge the two images into one. This provides a nice wide shot but adds the dimension of height so the viewer can see lots more of the room. I hope this stacking approach helped sell this house for my EXP Realty client!
Real Estate architectural photography of vaulted ceiling living room
Vaulted Living room with 2 stacked images in Photoshop
Architectural images that take a bit more work in Photoshop
Some architectural images take a bit more work. Occasionally as a professional architectural photographer it is necessary to dive into Photoshop to do painstaking hours of retouching. Here is an example of one of those architectural images that requires just sitting down at the computer and digging in. Knowing the nuances of Photoshop helps. Here are some of those tricks. First a single exposure of the building right out of the camera.
1200 West Marshall UVA singe exposure out of camera
The after shot after fusing 5 exposures, cleaning up the wires and poles, adjusting color, cleaning up the pavement and replacing the sky.
1200 West Marshall after retouching
Telephone pole wires are easy but not easy. The look straight but they are not – they droop. With the spot healing brush set to just a bit wider than the diameter of the wire, if you click on an edge of a window or some type of hard edge and then click as far at you think the wire will be straight enough to be contained in that healing path, and click on a final spot that also has a clean edge, you can make lots of progress cleaning up wires – even wires that cross windows and other parts of the building. Invariably there will be spot runs like this that will not work and you just have to pull out the clone stamp tool and do your best to match the length of the wire. Telephone poles will need the clone stamp tool – they are too wide for the spot healing tool. The spot healing too works as a content aware tool so it is looking for information around it to replace the selected area. Unless your telephone pole is sitting right over a nice clean stretch of brick, none of the healing or content aware approaches will work. Replacing the sky in this image is not too tough because there are no trees poking up over the roof line. A clean roof line is easy to select and then drop in a new sky.
Stacking Architectural photography
Stacking Architectural Photographs for property developement clients
Here is my main use of stacking architectural photographs. Often as professional architectural photographers we get frustrated as we are shooting a scene because even with a wide angle lens, we cannot see enough of the top or bottom of the room or the building. The ceiling architecture of rooms are often the calling cards of the architects and the builders, and they want to see their work in the photograph. Shooting with any lens under 17 mm will really start distorting the image on the edges, as a fish eye lens will do. In order to provide my architectural clients with a larger image, I will merge an upper image which features the ceiling, and a lower images which features more of the floor and the foreground. I can do this with the Canon 17 mm tilt shift lens because all I have to do is shift the lens up and down to get these two images.
Univ Crossings student housing upper image
Univ Crossings student housing bottom image
Photoshop then merges the two seamlessly.
Univ Crossings merged top and bottom big
Now I have a master image that is not a 3×2 landscape aspect ratio, which is what comes out of the camera, but instead, depending on my final crop, I get a 1×1 or square image – the same width as the native capture but taller, and often a much taller image than square like a 1 x 1.3 aspect ratio. Suffice it to say that stacking architectural photographs provides my clients with more “real estate” in the image and gives my cleints’ advertising and marketing design team me more latitude to crop vertically or horizontally depending on the need of the ad layout. The images also now has the feel of the kind of image that might come from a medium format camera.
Some recent portraits
- At May 09, 2017
- By Johnny Stevens
- In portrait, portrait photography
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These are some recent portraits I have photographed that both use a soft glow layer in Photoshop but in different ways. The Pumas below were shot at Hilton Head on the beach. When you shoot on the beach on a sunny day, you have to remember that you are shooting not with a large soft box but inside of a large soft box because the sand is kicking light up and all around. So The beach is a great place to start for a hi key style portrait. As the sun was indeed behind them, I knew I would have to add light so my wife held a Canon 600 ex rt shooting through a 24 inch Westcott umbrella just right of camera. The soft glow on this shot was achieved with a gaussian blur layer set to overlay.You can see the soft glow effect more substantially on the back of his and her hair where the sun is the brightest. As a portrait photographer in Austin, I try to determine what style of portrait is best suited for each group or individual.
Paul and Terri portrait with glow effect
Another example is Claire’s portrait. I really like her shot out of the box,
Claire portrait straight out of the camera
but I thought a bit of glow effect would add some contrast and add some drama. It darkened the background at the same time which added even more drama.
Claire with glow effect
