Hi Everyone, I'm been watching a lot of FStoppers videos and a casual lurker of the community for some time, however my first time posting. I've been enthralled with the techniques and processes for architecture photos and wanted to try my hand at it. I photographed and composited this image over the weekend as my first attempt. Any feedback is greatly appreciate as I enjoy a lot of the work within the site. Thanks!
It's not bad at all. The time of the day is right and the interior illumination looks to be pretty balanced. Just a couple of observations:
- Think about what a home buyer would want to see or what a realtor would want to show off. In this case, it would be the patio and what looks to be the rear fascia of the building. This area takes up about a third of the photo while the rest is obscured by landscaping. You may want to try to get closer to show off that area or, if you're looking for an overall rear shot of the building, move to camera left to get more of the building's elements into the shot.
- Check the saturation of the trees. The green looks to be pushed a bit too hard. The same may be said of the interior lighting - that looks to be very, very orange (like 2800k). Is it really this orange on the inside? If not, try biasing the orange more toward yellow, bring the orange saturation down, and/or increase the luminosity for orange.
- There's a ton of foreground at the bottom of the shot which could be used more effectively in the frame. Even just panning up a bit would help. If you aren't using a tilt-shit to perspective correct when panning up, I could see how this could be an issue.
- Watch your verticals. The walls are just a tad off, but this is really just nitpicky.
- Try light painting a bit on some of the elements such as the rock island up front, the landscaping at the far left, and the landscaping to the right of the tree that gets lost in shadow. You may also want to consider photoshopping a live fire in the firepit if you want to get fancy.
Overall, it's a very pretty photo. Just remember the audience - you're going to want to exhibit the architectural and design elements if this is for an architect, the materials, finishes, and amenities if it's for a construction company, the landscaping if it's for a landscape architect, the "liveability" if you're a realtor or the value if you're a homeowner looking to sell.
Thanks for sharing, look forward to checking out more of your work!
Rob - First, thank you for the detailed response and I agree with your points. I used a 24-105 lens and a speedlite. Once I got working, the time of night got away from me a bit and missed a few areas that you picked up on. The owner of the house is a family friend I visited for the weekend and kindly let me play around. It was a fun learning experience as this type of photography is new to me. Thanks for your feedback and will keep it in mind in my next attempts. Cheers!
Sounds like the perfect situation to practice with - it's not easy trying to time a shoot to get that perfect light! Looking forward to your next shots!
Rob, your observations/tips will be very useful for the rest of us who don't have a lot of experience with this type of shot. I especially appreciated what you said about green and orange saturation.
Glad you could get something out of it, Jerry!
This is your first try? Excellent job! If we are pixel peeping:
perhaps a little manual fill or "light painting" on the brick wall and the rocks in the right foreground.. another alternative is start a little earlier with 5-7 stop brackets so that you can layer and paint in the brick wall to this existing image... perhaps also increase "vibrance" for the sky a little more..
It also feels like you're leaning a little to the right... distortion edit the upper left corner to straighten up the middle 3 story windows a bit.. I'd also add a touch of color correction as it's all a tad on the red side... perhaps also bring down the orange windows a notch.
Great job though..