Ah, the twilight-exterior image –– by all accounts, the most striking photo in all of architectural photography. Below I am going to dissect a twilight photo that I made, commissioned by the architect who designed an addition for this house.
When I was first getting started in architectural photography, I felt the need to go absolutely crazy with light painting and compositing on these twilight photos. I have since learned that the power of this genre of photography lies in its subtleties, but this architecture called for a style of production a bit heavier than I typically use, so it's a good example of the work that goes into each one of these images. Above is the "base" expose that I took, around 15 minutes before sunset. Next, after waiting for what always seems like an eternity, we reached the magical 5-10 minute window, during which the lighting conditions are prime for adding supplemental flash.
One great aspect of this job is the hundreds and hundreds of photos that I have collected of myself, frantically running around a scene, holding a giant flash in the air. After I lit the house and furniture, we played the waiting game again until the sun had completely set. At this point, I captured exposures that I would later composite into the windows, and lit the landscaping with a constant light.
After all of this on-location work, I returned to Photoshop, added a dramatic sky and composited everything together. Yep, quite a bit of work, but I've attached the final result below. Every time I export one of these photos from Photoshop, I breath a huge sigh of relief. I was super happy with how this turned out and so was my client!
