Top of the layer cake

This a local three bedroom townhouse that is going back into the rental pool after a major renovation. While it's not the fanciest place I've been in, it's fairly typical of the work I do on a day to day basis. While it looks fairly straight forward, it's actually three separate photographs stacked on top of each other.


Here is the base image, except with the colour target in the frame. The lighting is very warm because of the halogen track lighting, and the colour target gives me a neutral tone to use to get an accurate colour balance. The biggest problems with this photo is that the light outside through the window is totally blown out, there is a big reflection in the painting of the strobe's softbox, and the fireplace is dark.


Here is another version with the strobe turned off and exposure set for the outside lighting. I dropped in the view of the exterior overtop of the original photo to balance the light outside. I also copied out the painting above the fireplace to fix the reflection in the glass.


In the final image, I turned off all the lights, and lit a big fire, and then dropped the image of the fireplace onto the final image.

The image was lit with an Alien Bee strobe with a medium softbox.

You can see more of my architectural work at http://www.davidbuzzard.com/

Tech Stuff
Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: Nikon AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8
Lighting: Alienn Bee B1600 640 w/sec strobe with a 24x16" softbox. Radio Popper radio slaves.

Sweet Soul Burlesque

Crystal Precious and Burgundy Brixx
I've helped to launch two independent newspapers based in Squamish, both published by my friend Alan Forsythe. It's been so much fun that he decided to start another one in Vancouver, the Urban Pie. A part of our lead up to the first edition, I spent yesterday shooting for the first feature stories, Sweet Soul Burlesque and the Rio Theatre.

Crystal Precious, leader of the Sweet Soul Burlesque Troop and Burgundy Brixx are a big part of the vibrant Vancouver burlesque scene, and can be seen in live shows around the city.


MC Purrfessor, Burgundy Brixx, and Crystal Precious

Executive House Photo Shoot

I spent a busy day shooting this brand new executive Whistler house for CR Contracting, the builders of the place. The house contains some amazing timber framing, with entire tree trunks being used for the upright posts.

This first shot is the front entry, looking towards the kitchen and breakfast nook. One of the great features of this house are the three story high, floor to ceiling windows, but that also caused me huge problems, as it's such a bright light source that almost everything in the room is silhouetted. To balance the light, I used a 640w/s strobe with a large softbox on the second floor landing to camera left to light the the centre and camera right posts, another 640w/s light on the floor to camera left aimed at the bar, and a third 640w/s light with a small softbox behind the post on camera left to light the kitchen.

Actually, the biggest problem with this shot was the $35,000 Steinway baby grand piano that was in the middle of the room and generally in the way of everything. I grabbed a couple of painters who were finishing some work, and we moved it off to the side of the room by the window. The thing weighed more than an old Buick.




This is a shot of the living room from the top mezzanine. Although it looks fairly straight forward, it presented a number of problems. First, there are some very strong vertical lines created by the wooden posts. With a regular wide angle lens, when you aim it down into the room, you get downward pointing converging lines (as you can see in the bottom version of the photo) that make it look like the posts are splaying out. I used a special perspective control lens that allowed me to keep the focal plane parallel to the posts, keeping lines on the posts straight.

Second problem was that there was a large canvas painting on the wall that was bright blue, conflicting badly with the earth tone colour scheme in the room. To fix that, in Photoshop I selected the painting, then I sampled a tone from the coffee table and used it for a gradient overlay to get the painting to match the surrounds a bit better.






The kitchen and library were also problematic. The dark wood panelling looks great, but sucks up light like a black hole. To get any definition, you need use some serious strobe light.  In the lowest photo, you can see the room sans the strobe.

The other problem is that the light outside was several stops brighter than the inside, even with the strobe. To deal with this, I needed to take a shot exposed for the light outside, and then make a special Photoshop mask so that only the outside part of that photo shows through the window, and then overlay that shot on the original image of the inside of the room.


This was actually pretty easy to shoot. The perspective control lens kept the lines straight. I still have another day of work on the house, so there's still a few shots still to come on this one.

Tech Stuff
Camera: Nikon D700
Lenses: Nikon AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8 and Nikkor 28mm f/3.5 PC
Lighting: Alien Bee B1600 640w/s strobe units X 3, 48x32" Photoflex Softbox, 24x16" Photoflex Softbox, 22" Alien Bee Beauty Dish with diffusion sock. Radio Popper Slave Slave Units.