Here's a new light painting before and after of a beautiful home in Las Vegas. This house definitely benefited with the lighting painting technique to be able to show off the full extent of the houses backyard beauty, pool, spa, pool tiling, grill and simultaneously allowing you to appreciated the exterior & interior views. C & C always appreciated.
https://fstoppers.com/photo/83681
Behind the scenes retouching speed edit video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yleo1SaaBwo
Incredible! Such a complicated space, but I feel like you have nailed the composition and relative exposures of different elements. If I try to find a nit to pick at, perhaps the shrub, bottom right draws the eye a little and takes up a fair amount of space. The management of all the strobe lighting is perfect, the image looks very natural, which is so difficult when lighting buildings and replacing skies etc..
Thank you, I know what you mean about the shrub, but it had to be in the shot to be able to get this composition, and I had to light it or else it would look awkward being not lit, so I just dialed down the exposure on it so its not too bright.
That's an impressive amount of layers to composite with. In the end, you did a nice job combining them all. Nothing seems overly flashy beyond the speculars off the grill, the left post of the gazebo, and the chimney but minor enough for real estate.
Being lazy...ehem efficient, I use a large octa softbox to reduce the layer count. Also helps with gradient inconsistencies over large surfaces. If the budget's tight, you could always bounce a speedlight (or three w/bracket) into a cheap umbrella softbox (http://amzn.com/B00PIM3I7W). Definitely worth the small investment to reduce post time.
Compositionally, you made an excellent compromise of having unobstructed views of each feature in the back of the property. It would have been nice to compress the geometry to emphasize the fire pit more, but it seems the camera was already at the property line and couldn't move back any further to shoot less wide.
As a personal preference I try to crop out distorted Y shaped junctions when they're near frame edge, like the close corner of the spa. The eye is naturally drawn to these junctions for depth cues and in this scenario detracts from your subject. The 16x9 crop you have on the youtube still resolved this though :)
Thanks for sharing! Look forward to seeing more work.
Thank for your comments. My next venture will be to try a larger light source to see if that works out for me. I just love how light weight and easy it is to use the speedlites, but for huge areas that needs coverage I can see the benefit of a larger light source. How large of an octobox are you using?
It really is nice to have something so compact, but the extra diffusion and spread make up for the weight. I use a 60" deep octa and I'm not going to lie--it can be unwieldy if it's windy out. Switching to a 36" helps in those scenarios. Attaching a cell phone to the light stand for remote triggering and review is super handy (http://amzn.com/B00J9246GE) and letting the base of the stand rest on the hip bone really helps with endurance. I imagine someone could make a sling for better posturing though. All my softboxes are quick to setup and compact when storing (fotodiox has a very affordable EZ-Pro series) so it's hard to find reasons not to use softboxes for twilights. You won't regret it!
Awesome work. It's nice for me to be able to do most of that on camera now.
Thank you. Are you bring out a lot of lights and getting it all in camera?
Using Live Composite feature. Allows me to light each component and view as I go.