One-Light Real Estate Photography

While down in Florida last month, I found out that my parents' next-door neighbors (and good friends) were selling their house. I was a little bummed, as they are good folks and you hate to see them leave.

But I was even more bummed when I saw the point-and-shoot specials the real estate agent had thrown up on the "for sale" page.

We only had one working flash. But certainly we could do better than that...
__________


One House, One Strobe, No Problem

Okay, to be clear I did bring two SB-800's down to Florida. But I only brought two sets of AA batts, too. (Hey, trying to travel light here.) And when one set of batts gets liberated by the kids to power yet another few hours of continuous Wii playing, two SB-800's become one SB-800.

And to be fair, I am no Scott Hargis, either. He is a magician at speedlighting a house to within a hair's breadth of Architectural Digest. But one SB-800s is better than no SB-800s, so we gave it a whirl anyway.

The trick, as always when using a small light to light a big thing, is to wait for the ambient to come to you.

We wanted to do four looks, with one strobe, in one evening. Each would be an exercise in flash/ambient balance. And each would need to be shot at a different time -- but all at twilight.

First stop was the interior, seen above. For this, we needed to balance flash with two ambient sources -- one fixed and one declining.

The outside light would be constantly falling, and the lamps inside would be constant. Because the flash would be lighting a large area, we needed a decent ISO speed and a large aperture.

If memory serves, we went with ISO 400 at f/4. Don't quote me, but it was at least close to there for the reasons listed above.

So, the f/4 becomes the anchor for the exposure. Using f/4, you chimp a little on the shutter speed to see where the lamps will look best. You want them bright, but not nuclear.

Remember -- they do not have to light the room. The flash will do that. They just have to look good.

Once you get the f/stop and shutter speed, it's simply a matter of waiting for the outside ambient light to drop down to where the windows look good. At that point, we pulled everything together by throwing a flash into the ceiling to bring up the rest of the room.

We had to nuke it - either 1/2 or full power, if I remember correctly. Always gonna take a lot of power to pull this off. If full power is not enough, you have to walk the ISO up until it is. (You'd walk the shutter down to keep the ambient in balance.)

Bonus: The ceiling-bounced flash is gonna pick up some warmth to accentuate the wood in the room. With more time, we would have lit a fire in the fireplace. But honestly, those are usually just for show in Florida anyway.


Moving fast now, we went out front. The front view is very cluttered, graphically speaking. Lots of trees and bushes. So I wanted to highlight the house with some focused light. We backed the flash up behind the camera and over on the left and zoomed it to 105mm.

Half power was more than enough light to pop the house -- and just the house -- to make it stand out against a twilight sky.

Easy balance here: Pop the flash on the house at a 250th of a sec, adjust the aperture until the house looks best, open up the shutter until the background looks best. Quick and easy.

Since the house is being lit by a low, warm light source it almost looks as if the house is being lit by the sunset. When the sunset is, in fact, happening at back camera left.


Next, we went to the back of the house. The ambient is getting much darker and now those interior lights are starting to sing. Nice and bright, relatively speaking.

So now the interior lights are the focal point and the twilight afterglow is secondary, as far as the ambient is concerned. But the house exterior needs bringing up. Given enough aperture and ISO (we were at 400) this is another easy, one-speedlight job.

The flash for this photo needed to light both the house and the trees I used to frame it. So we placed it out a ways at camera right and pumped it all of the way up to full power. (That throw to the house was an easy hundred feet or so. Maybe more.)

By feathering the light (aiming it between the trees and the house -- more toward the house) we could light both objects evenly, even though the house was much further way.


Now that we were done with the three-source-balancing stuff, we could finish off down at the dock. No hurries now, as we could fix the one ambient source no matter how dark it got. For those keeping score, this is the same dock as the one on the left in the tiki hut photos, if you want to get any context.

At this point, this one-light real estate stuff should be making sense. In a fairly dark ambient environment, I stuck a voice-activated light stand (AKA my dad) up on the dock. I had him aim the SB-800 (at 1/4 power, and synched with a Pocket Wizard) high, across the top of the dock. Actually aiming it a little up into the air. This helped to feather the light and keep the left side of the dock (from the camera's perspective) from getting too hot.

Meanwhile, I am down in the water:

Start on a high shutter (1/250th) to kill the ambient. Firing the flash, chimp the various aperture settings until the dock looks good. Open up the shutter until the ambient (post-sunset sky and reflection) looks good.

This stuff is not hard. It's about a three-minute job, and two minutes out of three are spent showing my dad how to hold and aim the flash.
_________


So, there you have it: A quick-and-dirty twilight real estate package, to replace the point-and-shoot nightmare on the "for sale" page.

Not that we couldn't have done a nice job with a point-and-shoot, too...



NEXT: On Assignment: Reluctant Poet


GEAR USED:

(Same setup, all photos)

Nikon D3
Nikon 17-35/2.8
Nikon SB-800
Pocket Wizard Plus II

Speedlinks, Super-Size Edition

I let the speedlinks bucket fill up a little too long since last time. But the result is that we have a whole weekend's worth of good ones, after the jump.

Hope you enjoy them, and have a fun weekend.
_______


Speedlinks, August 8, 2008

• Peter Yang (See also: On Assignment: Peter Yang Shoots Admiral William Fallon) has posted photos from his recent cowboy shoot for Texas Monthly. Dude can light. Several of the photos went straight to my "Inspiration" folder on the iPhone. He has posted the photos on his website. Earlier, he gave a ballsy interview about the story to Rob Haggart, at APE.

• The Flash Centre (UK-based lighting stores) has lit up a YouTube channel, where they have been uploading lots of lighting tutorials. Older stuff, and specific gear related, but worth watching if you are considering buying Elinchrom gear.

• Scott Kelby has checked in with a coupla cool gear finds lately: The Kwik Stand and a nifty li'l lighting case.

• Do you shoot with a TTL-off-camera cord? Andrew shows you how to "light from the right" with this left-handed camera grip.

• Traveling to a large, internet-blocking country to cover the Olympics? On Sports Shooter, USA Today's Bert Hanashiro shows what how he whittled down his gear bag to -- and how he packed it.

• Speaking of the Olympics, Hot Shot Shooter and Apple Stud Vincent Laforet has started blogging, and it is already a go-to site for good info. (And see what he is bringing to Beijing, here.)

• David Bergman, whom I met at Shoot! The Day in NYC, spends his time either working for SI or shooting rock stars. Not bad work if you can get it. He is starting to include some lighting how-to info on his blog, including a link to his field test article on the RadioPoppers.


Saving the best for last:

• I first saw Scott Strazzante's "Common Ground" project while serving as a judge in this year's Southern Short Course in Charlotte, where we judged it Best in Show. Now Brian and the other folks at MediaStorm have morphed it into a fantastic multimedia presentation.

Highly recommended.

Chase Jarvis Runs a Three-Minute Mile

Please fasten your seatbelts and place seat backs in the upright position. The On Assignment Bullet Train is leaving the station in 3, 2, 1...



If you like your Chase slower -- and with homemade chill music -- catch his long-form photo career pep talk here. And definitely take a look at his website if you don't already have it set as your home page.


NOTE: If you are watching this via email subscription, you may have to click through on the headline to view the video.

-30-

Behind the Scenes with Martin Schoeller

Are you female?

Can you bench press a Cooper Mini?

Does the volume knob your tanning machine go to eleven?

Are you a lighting geek?

If you answered yes to all of those questions, this is your lucky day.

From a documentary on women bodybuilders, a YouTube video of a shoot of Vicki Nixon by Martin Schoeller. Annotated video, after the jump.Read more »

Strobe-On-A-Rope, Episode Three

Way back in the day, when old-skool lighting guru Jon Falk (Adventures in Location Lighting) talked about "strobe on a rope" he meant severing the flash tube and using it with an extension cord for extreme flexibility.

When I talked about it, I meant using off-camera TTL cords, which can even be stacked if needed.

When Wizwow talks about strobe on a rope, he means, uh, tying your flash to an actual piece of string. Seriously.

-30-

On Assignment: 50 Years

When I travel with the family, I try to strike a balance between having enough gear with me to make nice photos and not feeling like a pack mule. I frequently guess wrong on the "how much to bring" question, but it usually comes down to a tight SLR bag (with an off-camera light kit) or a Canon G9.

Earlier this summer, I drove down to Florida with Susan and the kids to visit my parents. I brought along a camera, a coupla small flashes and an idea for a photo I wanted to make for the upcoming 50th anniversary of my parents' first date. It was to be a family photo, but I wanted to approach it just as seriously as if I had gotten the job from a national magazine.

Mom and dad have retired to the shores of Lake Billy Boohoo, just north of the sprawling metropolis of Umatilla, Florida. (Population: Not very many.)

No, I am not making that lake name up, either. Some kid, presumably named Billy, drowned there in the 1950's and the name stuck. The sunset above is typical of the beautiful, subtropical displays they get in the evening.

Note to self: If I ever buy lakefront property in Florida, buy on the east side for the view. I only see sunrises when I am up too late from the night before.

Personally, I could probably go twenty years without getting the idea to build a private "tiki hut." But then, I am not my parents, living on this lake, with some serious time to kill. So that's what they did.

When they told me about it last winter, I knew I wanted to photo them in the hut against a sunset. When I learned that they were coming up on the 50th anniversary of their first date (in the 8th grade) I figured this summer's trip would be a perfect time to shoot them.


If you are a long-time reader of this site, I hope the gears are already turning. Pop some nice flash against that sunset (maybe in an umbrella, warming gel, etc.) and Bob's your uncle. Problem is, Westcott double-fold shoot-thru's do not normally live on beaches. And while the light might look nice, it would not really make sense.

Motivated light is one of the keys to getting believability and logic in your lit photos. Where would the light come from? What would the light look like?

Those are questions you should be asking yourself before you design the light in your photos if you want to hold a visual narrative.

So, I decided not to light for soft, flattering and warm but rather to emulate the light that would likely be in the tiki hut had dad run some electricity out there. (Give him enough time and he probably will, along with a computer terminal to check the weather a few hundred times a day...)

So my light was a single SB-800, sporting a CTO gel and a diffusion dome, mounted in the top of the hut with a Super Clamp.

Presto: One bare tungsten light bulb, albeit much more controllable.

The first test, above, shows where the light is mounted. I decided to just flood them from overhead with some "tungsten" light, and balance the flash with the sunset. A quick pop shows that I can get a clean 5.6 at half power, which is pretty good considering the diffuser and the gel both eat a lot of light.

So that gives me my working aperture. But the sky is too bright at my sync speed to look good at this point.

How do you fix that? You wait. Or you cheat.


This shot was taken at a 500th of a second -- a full stop past the normal top sync speed. Sure, I could go with focal plane high speed sync. But that robs power from the flash, and I needed power.

So, how to sync at a 500th? No problem if you do not need the whole frame to be flashed. My SB-800 was just lighting the bottom part of the frame, so no big whup cheating the sync for this shot.

Since the "black stripe" creeps in from the bottom of my photo, I did turn the camera upside down to cheat this one. If the flash would have needed to light the whole frame, you would have seen that it was dark in the upper half, due to incorrect synching.

So now I waited for the ambient level to come to me. But while I waited, I decided to shoot the final photo at 1/320th of a second, to use that small, "no-synch" bar to seal off the flash from the bottom of my photo. (Camera right-side up for that one.)

It feathered the flash nicely, and kept the bright part from leading your eye out of the frame.
__________




Here is the final shot, after the sunset came down to a level where 1/320th looked good against the correct (flashed) aperture. I love this photo, and will be making a nice print of it soon. (Click the pic to see it bigger.)

And given that you can vary the flash by fiddling with the aperture, and the sky by tweaking the shutter speed, I could have placed either tone anywhere I wanted. In this way, you get much more control through the shooting window than if there had been a real, continuous light bulb up in there.

Mom and dad wanted a shot from the side while I was at it, where you could see their faces better. Who am I to argue, except for the fact that I do not have an umbrella with me to diffuse the light. And besides, it is directly over their heads. Yuck.


My solution was to re-aim the light slightly, and take the diffuser off. I moved it to the front rail, aimed it a little forward and (mostly) balanced it off of the sand for a little over/under light.

It was the best I could do on short notice. But I think it looks kinda cool, considering. A little ham-fisted Photoshop session later and I was even able to clone the edges of the clamp out of the shot. (Couldn't really hide it from the side.)

It's amazing what you can do with one little flash if you wait for the ambient to come to you. Even more so the other small-flash job we did down there, which was to shoot a series of real estate photos of the luxury log cabin next door -- with one SB-800.

NEXT: One-Light Real Estate Photography

Will Shoot For Food

On Friday, one hundred people left The Baltimore Sun -- 60 from the newsroom alone.

One of them was yours truly, having returned early from my one-year leave to take a buyout. There was a hard staff reduction quota in effect, and given the way the blog has gone I thought it would be best if I counted toward it when they started lopping off heads...

Over the next few months I will be working hard to shape my second career as a photographer. I have shot as a staffer for newspapers for twenty years, which gives me a wonderful breadth of experience. But in many ways, I am dating again after having been married for two decades.

I know that many people who read this site are amateurs who are at least toying with the idea of going pro in one way or another. I also know that there are PJ readers who either are -- or will be -- facing hard cuts in the newsroom. In that sense, we now have much in common.

So I will be going through the growth process fishbowl-style, in the hopes that the shared experience might be helpful to those of you who are toying with the idea of going pro and wondering how to approach it.

Fortunately, the headline is, for me, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I am not worried about whether or not I'll have a job. The website -- many thanks to all of you -- offers some breathing room on the financial side of things. But I have always been a photographer, and that is what I want to continue to be.

The question is, what now? Who I will be shooting for? What will I be shooting?

Who knows. I'll be curious to see where the combination of shooting and writing about it takes me.

Newspapers are facing hard times these days. Printing news on dead trees is tough row to hoe in 2008. From here, survival wll be determined by how fast -- and how well -- papers can migrate their readership to the web.

And as for the people who left The Sun this week, rest assured that that they did not go quietly into the night:



Best of luck to all of my friends and colleagues who are entering the next phase of their lives. Please write when you find work.

-30-