Fun Times On A Houseboat
I shot the houseboat below for a client recently and a couple of images stood out during the shoot that are interesting in a photographic sense.
The first is this fun exterior with the Aurora bridge. Nothing technically challenging with this, but I like the way the bridge overhead and reflected below frame the house nicely. Shot with a 24-70 lens at 24mm with a circular polarizer to help out the blue sky.
Photography is "Problem Solving 101"
The second shot artistically is less interesting but there is more problem solving going on than first meets the eye.
First: I’m on a houseboat. Houseboats float and move with the waves. Which means I need to keep a fairly high shutter speed. Not too much of a problem since the scene if already very bright.
Second: I’m trying to shoot a “deck” which in reality is a “dock”. It’s floating too and much less stable than the house. See above.
Third: The contrast, or dynamic range, between the shadow area and the full sun area is too large for my camera to capture in one exposure.
Solutions
There are several ways this could be approached.
1) Use several images with different exposures and blend them together in Photoshop later. That would work fine but takes too long for this particular job. The movement of the dock and boats between frames might make this a bit tricky.
2) Use several images with different exposures and blend them automatically using an HDR or Enfusion program. That would normally be a good option, but again the potential movement of dock and boats would cause ghosting or copies of elements. Shutter speeds could increase too much trying to get a proper exposure for the shadow are and motion blur could occur.
3) Use a graduated neutral density filter and place it over the full-sun portion of the frame to bring the exposure for the two areas closer together. This works best when the shadow line is nice and straight and the shadow line in this picture isn’t straight. Also I don’t have a graduated ND filter in my kit right now.
4) Wait. I actually did wait to get the shot, but I couldn’t wait as long as I needed. Waiting is a good option and would have produced a nice result when the sun was setting or behind the nearby hill, but no time for that.
5) Use fill-flash. Since I bring my hot-shoe flashes to real estate shoots I had them available. For this sunny day it took two flashes on full power to bring the shadow area up to a relatively decent level so it still looks like shadow, but doesn’t look like a large black area.
Manage the light
Most photography is about managing the differences between the shadow and highlight areas of a scene to bring them closer together so the camera can capture the scene as our eyes see it. While there are a multitude of ways to accomplish that, it always comes down to what works best for the given situation and the effect you are trying to produce.
