Thursday, August 26, 2010

Real Estate Editorial Shoot - davem photography

Shot for RE Magazine back in May and I think the magazine was published in July. I completely forgot about this shoot until I went through a stack of magazines on my coffee table the other day.

This was actually two shoots and two separate stories. Below are images from the magazine.







These shoot were challenging in that I was shooting in various lighting scenarios, including outdoor natural, in home tungsten & office fluorescent.
My go to light setup is my 60" umbrella. For this shot on the stairs, this worked perfectly.  I was able to create a large, soft light source that would not generate distracting shadows, especially when individuals are seated in different planes.

I also used a 60" umbrella for this shot. I believe I used a 1/4 CTO gel on both shots because there were interior lights that were tungsten. Of course I wanted to match the existing/ambient light as closely as possible.

This next shoot took a little bit more to setup. There was a large window with natural light coming through, but there was also fluorescent ceiling lights, two completely different color tempertures.  I tried turning off the ceiling lights, but I had to shoot with a larger aperture and even with my flash and 60" umbrella the ambient was too low to look the way an office would normally be lit. I decided to use the ceiling lights giving me a more even ambient light and closing the blinds to the window. This worked better for the ambient, but I was still shooting at a wide aperture and I knew I needed a bit more depth of field because the group would be sitting around the conference table at various distances and everyone need to be in focus.
I opted for a second light. I pulled out another flash with a dome diffuser and pointed it straight up to the ceiling and gelled both lights with CTG gels to match the green fluorescent color temperture. This setup allowed me to shoot at 1/50, f/7.1 ISO 400.

It's shoots like these that I love, because they challenge my lighting skills and force me to pay attention to existing light and make me work to complement it instead of trying to overpower it.

It's a was a great experience and I hope to do it again. Of course seeing your work in a printed magazine is always a nice reward.


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